Tag: Dr Binoy Kampmark

Australia

Diluted Sovereignty: A Very Australian Example – » The Australian Independent Media Network

All written and mythologised as greatness,

Australian concepts of sovereignty have always been qualified. First came the British settlers and invaders in 1788. They are pregnant with the sovereignty of the British Crown, bringing convicts, the sadistic screws, and forced labour to a garrison of penal experiments and brutality. The native populations are treated as nothing more than spares, opportunistic chances, and fluff of the land, a legal nonsense. In a land deemed empty, sovereignty is eviscerated.

Source: Diluted Sovereignty: A Very Australian Example – » The Australian Independent Media Network

America's Shame

HAK Birthdays: Henry Kissinger Turns 100 – » The Australian Independent Media Network

“Once you’ve been to Cambodia, you’ll never stop wanting to beat Henry Kissinger to death with your bare hands.” Anthony Bourdain, A Cook’s Tour (2002)

If a heavy resume of crimes is a guarantee of longevity, then surely Henry A. Kissinger (HAK, for short), must count as a good specimen. The list of butcheries attributed to his centurion, direct or otherwise, is extensive, his hand in them, finger fat and busy. There were the murderous meddles in Latin America, the conflicts in Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia. (The interventions in Laos and Cambodia are said to have left 350,000 Laotians and 600,000 Cambodians dead.) Then came the selective turning of blind eyes in Indonesia and Pakistan, and the ruthless sponsorship of coups in Africa.

Source: HAK Birthdays: Henry Kissinger Turns 100 – » The Australian Independent Media Network

India

Modi in Australia: Down Under Bliss for Hindutva – » The Australian Independent Media Network

Yes a bit more Bollywood the media gave Modi than the  reality

With all the fanfare, the stadium event was not all it seemed. One beady-eyed journalist noted that a venue with a seating capacity of 18,500 seemed less than packed. Vivek Astri, covering the visit for The Wire, noted “empty chairs scattered throughout the expansive venue.” It struck him as rather odd, given the fact the tickets had been gratis, with registration noisily promoted through such platforms as WhatsApp months before. “Curiously, there seemed to be a veil of secrecy surrounding the ticket distribution process, lending an air of privacy to the entire event.”

Source: Modi in Australia: Down Under Bliss for Hindutva – » The Australian Independent Media Network

Informed Comment

Rogue Consultants: PwC, Tax Evasion and Getting Clients – » The Australian Independent Media Network

In Australia, it has also been particularly galling to see the prospect that sharing such confidential information – notably in terms of tax policies – will see no PwC employee or member of management spend time mournfully gazing from a prison cell. That prospect is what faces Richard Boyle, the Australian Taxation Office’s whistleblower who exposed the predatory conduct of its debt collecting practices with tigerish courage.

Source: Rogue Consultants: PwC, Tax Evasion and Getting Clients – » The Australian Independent Media Network

Informed Comment

Fears of Abandonment: Australia, Biden and Cancelling the Quad Visit – » The Australian Independent Media Network

This is appropriately revealing. Supine, unquestioning, and moving between the statuses of vassal and satellite, Canberra sees its military outsourced, governed and policed by Washington, its strategic and operational goals dictated by the Pentagon, its relevance as a Pacific outpost measured only by its utility in defending US interests. Its role in any future war in the region alongside the United States, however foolish and bloody, is assured. What matters, however, is that the one pushing the trigger of intervention will not be an Australian.

Source: Fears of Abandonment: Australia, Biden and Cancelling the Quad Visit – » The Australian Independent Media Network

Informed Comment

Aqueous Matters: Europe’s Water Crisis – » The Australian Independent Media Network

Where has all the water gone and what is being done?

Even in the face of such climatic disturbance affecting that most vital of resources for life, countries will still find the miraculous energy and industry to wage war or at least prepare for it, all the while continuing to despoil environments. In time, the proposition that war will even be waged over water supply is a distinct, disturbing possibility.

Source: Aqueous Matters: Europe’s Water Crisis – » The Australian Independent Media Network

Uncategorized

Scott Morrison and Australia’s Lobby Complex – » The Australian Independent Media Network

One could well be suspicious of the fact that promises were made to Morrison well before the election debacle. Promises of a safe and rewarding nest in which to land if the French were doublecrossed and lied to.

The ministerial code of conduct also requires former ministers to “not take personal advantage of information to which they have had access as a minister, where the information is not generally available to the public.” This is an unenforceable, and essentially dead letter. To Clancy Moore, the chief executive of Transparency International Australia, the code remains “effectively a toothless tiger”.

Source: Scott Morrison and Australia’s Lobby Complex – » The Australian Independent Media Network

Informed Comment

Rerunning Biden’s Blunderland – » The Australian Independent Media Network

On a more serious note, another Biden administration, flavoured by the bouquet garni of error, is likely to make more wars, not fewer, likely. In the Indo-Pacific, a containment strategy of China is being pursued with militaristic glee, with a bewitched Australia supplying the strategic real estate in a policy of forward defence. In Ukraine, a proxy war with Russia continues to be waged, drawing NATO and the US into ever closer conflict. Biden’s Blunderland does not promise to be pretty, let alone an entertaining place.

Source: Rerunning Biden’s Blunderland – » The Australian Independent Media Network

Informed Comment

Foiled Escape: UC Global, the CIA and Julian Assange – » The Australian Independent Media Network

However described, the shabby treatment of Julian Assange never ceases to startle. While he continues to suffer in Belmarsh prison awaiting the torments of an interminable legal process, more material is coming out showing the way he was spied upon while staying at the Ecuadorian embassy in London. Of late, the Spanish daily El País…

Source: Foiled Escape: UC Global, the CIA and Julian Assange – » The Australian Independent Media Network

Informed Comment

Australia: Outsourced to the US Military Establishment – » The Australian Independent Media Network

It’s a very funny thing. In the US, the provision of services in such industries as security and intelligence is outsourced in a sprawling complex of contractors and subcontractors. In Australia, the entire military and security establishment is outsourced to Washington’s former mandarins, many of them earning a pile in consultancy fees. This, perhaps, is what Australia’s Defence Minister Richard Marles means when he talks about the Australian Defence Force moving “beyond interoperability to interchangeability.”

Source: Australia: Outsourced to the US Military Establishment – » The Australian Independent Media Network

Informed Comment

Anxiety as Socialism: AI Moratorium Fantasies – » The Australian Independent Media Network

Melanie Mitchell, an academic who knows a thing or two about the field, was bemused and tweeted as much. “Senator, I’m an AI researcher. Your description of ChatGPT is dangerously misinformed. Every sentence is incorrect. I hope you will learn more about how this system actually works, how it was trained, and what its limitations are.”

Source: Anxiety as Socialism: AI Moratorium Fantasies – » The Australian Independent Media Network

ALP Government,

Inglorious Inertia: The Albanese Government and Julian Assange – » The Australian Independent Media Network

Since then, it is very clear, as with all matters regarding US policy, that Australia will, if not agree outright with Washington, adopt a constipated, non-committal position. “Quiet diplomacy” is the official line taken by Albanese and Australian Foreign Minister Penny Wong, a mealy-mouthed formulation deserving of contempt. As Greens Senator David Shoebridge remarks, “‘quiet diplomacy’ to bring Julian Assange home by the Albanese Government is a policy of nothing. Not one meeting, phone call or letter sent.”

Source: Inglorious Inertia: The Albanese Government and Julian Assange – » The Australian Independent Media Network

Informed Comment

A Hazardous Decision: Supplying Ukraine with Depleted Uranium Shells – » The Australian Independent Media Network

Should they be taking them? Ukraine is desperate for any bit of warring materiel its armed forces can lay their hands on, but depleted uranium shells would surely not be a model example of use. And yet, the UK, in an act of killing with kindness, is happy to fork them out to aid the cause against the Russians, despite the scandals, the alleged illnesses, and environmental harms.

Source: A Hazardous Decision: Supplying Ukraine with Depleted Uranium Shells – » The Australian Independent Media Network

Informed Comment

War over Taiwan: Australia’s Gang of Five – » The Australian Independent Media Network

 

A few things are worth noting in this frothy mix of fantabulation and establishment fire breathing. In the quest to gather such a panel, no effort has been made to consult the expertise of a China hand. That lobby, able to provide a more nuanced, less heavy-footed approach, is being shunned, their advice exorcised in any effort to encourage war.

Source: War over Taiwan: Australia’s Gang of Five – » The Australian Independent Media Network

Informed Comment

Irresponsible Politics: Australia’s B-52 Nuclear Weapons Problem – » The Australian Independent Media Network

This ingloriously subservient status to Washington has been laid bare yet again, and along with that, the increasingly likely prospect of being targeted in any future conflict that involves the United States. Hardly a responsible state of affairs, and one on the verge of being treasonous.

Source: Irresponsible Politics: Australia’s B-52 Nuclear Weapons Problem – » The Australian Independent Media Network

Coal, Informed Comment

Corrupt and Fraudulent: Laying Bare the Adani Group – CounterPunch.org

There is nothing Gautam Adani will not do for money. In this sense, he is admirably dedicated to greed, so much so he has become its foremost caricature worthy of permanent enthronement. Mark this man’s name in the scriptures of eternity: There was nothing he did not do for the filthy lucre.

Source: Corrupt and Fraudulent: Laying Bare the Adani Group – CounterPunch.org

Informed Comment

Nuclear Submarine Doubts: US Lawmakers and AUKUS – » The Australian Independent Media Network

The policymaking apparatus behind the AUKUS security pact was shoddy from the start. It has raised questions about the extent US power will subordinate Australia further in future conflicts; it has brought into question Australia’s own sovereignty; and it has also raised the spectre of regional nuclear proliferation via the use of otherwise closely guarded propulsion technology.

Source: Nuclear Submarine Doubts: US Lawmakers and AUKUS – » The Australian Independent Media Network

Informed Comment

Joining the War Club: Australia’s HIMARS Purchase – » The Australian Independent Media Network

Another needless, fatuous endeavour; another irresponsible drain on the public purse; another expression that the military-industrial complex Down Under is thriving in all its insidious stupidity. But Australia’s purchase of HIMARS (High Mobility Artillery Rocket System) batteries from the United States can be put down to loneliness – or the feeling of being left out. And history shows that loneliness in the context of weapons and harm involves a need to acquire more means to do further harm.

Source: Joining the War Club: Australia’s HIMARS Purchase – » The Australian Independent Media Network

Informed Comment

It’s a season to be a warmonger – Pearls and Irritations

US Air Force Boeing B-52 Stratofortress bomber aircraft in flight.

For years, blood lusting Murdocrats and garden variety reactionaries have been hoping for a conflict they have no reason to participate in, nor provoke. Australia’s blessings of distance, and its prospects of being a broker rather than a provoker, are matters of scorn rather than praise. The scented anti-China oils and myrrh from Washington have proved so seductive, we are repeatedly treated to the prospect that Australian personnel will commit to a conflict over Taiwan.

Source: It’s a season to be a warmonger – Pearls and Irritations

Informed Comment

Julian Assange and Albanese’s Intervention – » The Australian Independent Media Network

The telling question here is whether Albanese will get any purchase with the Washington set. While enjoying a reputation as a pragmatic negotiator able to reach agreements in tight circumstances, the pull of the US national security establishment may prove too strong. “We now get to see Australia’s standing in Washington, valued ally or not,” was the guarded response of Assange’s father John Shipton.

Source: Julian Assange and Albanese’s Intervention – » The Australian Independent Media Network

Informed Comment

The Secret Wars of the US Imperium – » The Australian Independent Media Network

To get to where they are, imperial powers will deceive, dissimulate and distort. The US imperium, that most awesome of devilish powers, has tentacled itself across the globe, often unbeknownst to its own citizens.

In a report released by the New York University School of Law’s Brennan Center of Justice titled Secret War: How the US Uses Partnerships and Proxy Forces to Wage War Under the Radar, there is little to shock, though much to be concerned about. The author of the report contends that the list of countries supplied by the Pentagon on US military partnerships is a savagely clipped one. The list is so wrong that 17 countries have been omitted.

 

Source: The Secret Wars of the US Imperium – » The Australian Independent Media Network

Informed Comment

Tactical Nuclear Fantasists – » The Australian Independent Media Network

Bogeyman politics tends to be flatly unimaginative. The image of the nuclear-mad Russian President, counting his diminishing options, has caught the imagination of press and propaganda outlets across the West. Will Mad Vlad go the distance and deploy a nuclear weapon in Ukraine?

Source: Tactical Nuclear Fantasists – » The Australian Independent Media Network

UK

Exit Liz Truss; Enter Lettuce – » The Australian Independent Media Network

No sensible person will be seeking the office. But the Tory Party is riddled with the insensible. Sunak is likely to recontest. The leader of the House of Commons, Penny Mordaunt, is also a contender. Even Johnson, who did more than most to denigrate the office, is contemplating a return. For the moment, the lettuce won out. At the very least, it deserves a run.

Source: Exit Liz Truss; Enter Lettuce – » The Australian Independent Media Network

Informed Opinion

Fibs and Fantasy: Scott Morrison joins the Global Lecture Circuit – » The Australian Independent Media Network

The Morrison biography for this speakers’ group is a tell-tale reminder that the over-remunerated lecture circuit is filled with opportunistic frauds and fantasists keen on fees rather than facts. Hopefully the good burghers of Cook will wake up to that fact soon.

Source: Fibs and Fantasy: Scott Morrison joins the Global Lecture Circuit – » The Australian Independent Media Network

Informed Comment

Giorgia Meloni: The Great Replacement Moves In – » The Australian Independent Media Network

The program of Italy’s new government will be troubling to immigrants, minorities, women, the LGBT community and all groups that do not hum the regressive tune of the Brothers. But it is hard to see what those in Brussels will or can do. The EU is as complicit as any in the undermining of rights when it comes to, for instance, irregular migrants, keeping up barriers as much as possible, repelling the unwanted (Ukrainians excepted). An ugly continent, politically speaking, just got uglier.

Source: Giorgia Meloni: The Great Replacement Moves In – » The Australian Independent Media Network

Julian Assange

Facing the Warmongers: An Assange Update – » The Australian Independent Media Network

The world has turned full circle. Those opening the cabinet of secrets are considered the nasty tittle-tattles, who simply revealed the fact that daddy fiddled and mummy drank. In this world, homicidally excited types like Bolton revel in expressing unsavoury views in the open; those who expose the bankruptcy of such views are to be punished. We await the next grotesquery with resigned disgust.

Source: Facing the Warmongers: An Assange Update – » The Australian Independent Media Network

Informed Comment

Data Retention and the Devotees of Mass Surveillance – » The Australian Independent Media Network

It is a stinker in terms of policy, and unconvincing in effect, but the wholesale, indiscriminate retention of telecommunications data continues to excite legislators and law enforcement.

In 2015, when the Data Retention Bill was introduced, advocates and those in the telecommunications industry had reason to be worried. In testimony to the Parliamentary Joint Committee on Intelligence and Security, Telstra Director of Government Relations, James Shaw, noted that the telco’s practice over peak times such as New Year’s Eve was to only retain some data for a few hours before being overwritten. This was markedly shorter than the Bill’s proposed two-year retention period.

Telstra’s Chief Information Security Officer Michael Burgess also issued a warning that such legislative requirements would embolden hackers. “We would have to put extra measures in place … to make sure that data was safe from those that should not have access to it.”

Electronic Frontiers Australia Executive Office Jon Lawrence was even more trenchant in explaining to the Joint Committee that such data retention requirements were an “unnecessary and disproportionate invasion of privacy” and would “literally be a honeypot to organised crime, to any sort of person who can potentially access it.”

Source: Data Retention and the Devotees of Mass Surveillance – » The Australian Independent Media Network

UK

The Liz Truss Disaster Show – » The Australian Independent Media Network

Barely into her prime ministership, Truss has laid the basis for its demise. When she and her party return to Westminster, the sense of vultures circling will be palpable. While recent years tell us that polls are nonsensical excursions of fancy, rarely to be trusted, it is hard to sense that the current figures are off. Should they remain at their current levels, a massacre at the ballot box is in the making.

Source: The Liz Truss Disaster Show – » The Australian Independent Media Network

Informed Comment

Gautam Adani: Ecological Crossdresser – » The Australian Independent Media Network

Imagine the tobacco producer who invests in smoke limitation programs, or the arms manufacturer who attends a conference proposing to ban weapons and seek a better future. Gautam Adani, one of India’s most ruthlessly adept billionaires, has added his name to the growing list of corporate transvestism, using ecological credentials as his camouflage for fossil fuel predation.

Source: Gautam Adani: Ecological Crossdresser – » The Australian Independent Media Network

Free Speech

Offence by Another Name: Suppressing Anti-Royal Protest in Britain – » The Australian Independent Media Network

Shut your mouth you’re committing an offence in the UK

This is hardly a satisfactory state of affairs, showing, yet again, that the Sceptred Isle can hardly be counted as an impregnable bastion of free speech and public dissent. “If people are not allowed to quietly, if offensively, protest against the proclamation of a king,” reflects O’Neill, “then clearly our country is not as free as we thought.”

Source: Offence by Another Name: Suppressing Anti-Royal Protest in Britain – » The Australian Independent Media Network

Tertiary Education

Beggars in surplus: Australia’s university gangsters

Vice Chancellors today are vacuum cleaners sucking up bonus wages in $ millions. Increasing their earnings by simply sacking staff en-mass, stealing wages, and offering degree courses to local and overseas students on the backs of an army of untenured part-time and casual staff and online to absolutely every and anyone. Yes, today you can simply buy a degree. Courses no longer carry the same prestige they once had forcing students to stay on longer in the ever-increasing, double degrees MBAs and PhD debt trap with no more guarantee of a job based on merit than before. Who you know still wins out over what you know where Lachlan Murdoch a BA in Philosophy is living proof despite One Tel and Ch10 on his track record.

The education system has been in sharp decline in inverse proportion to the financial returns being hailed. Throwing public money at these beggars in surplus, an otherwise sensible proposition that could shield the sector from the ravages of impudent investment decisions, looks less appealing on closer inspection. Without deep, remorselessly brave reform, one that directly decapitates the officialdom of university management, good money will be thrown after ill-gotten gains.

Source: Beggars in surplus: Australia’s university gangsters

Education, Tertiary Education

Beggars in Surplus: Australia’s University Gangsters – » The Australian Independent Media Network

Instead of being interrogated by appropriate QCs and chased up with a sharp summons, these managers only grow in number, the mold of administrative disaster, undermining academic health at every turn and creating the next absurd brand they call a “university”. With each semester, new positions are created with names disturbingly reminiscent of industrial cleaning products: DVCs, PVCs, Deputy PVCs and what not. These fatuous appointments are subsidised, in turn, by the labours of ailing, overworked staff, contemplating ruination, dejection, and suicide.

The education system has been in sharp decline in inverse proportion to the financial returns being hailed. Throwing public money at these beggars in surplus, an otherwise sensible proposition that could shield the sector from the ravages of impudent investment decisions, looks less appealing on closer inspection. Without deep, remorselessly brave reform, one that directly decapitates the officialdom of university management, good money will be thrown after ill-gotten gains.

Beggars in Surplus: Australia’s University Gangsters – » The Australian Independent Media Network
Julian Assange

It’s All Political: Julian Assange Appeals his Extradition – » The Australian Independent Media Network

In giving the rules of the sordid game away – exposing the atrocities, the abuses of power, the bankruptcy of unrepresentative politics – the Australian founder of WikiLeaks became themost prominent political target of the US imperium. Journalism and activism have, in Assange, combined, his case nothing if not political. It remains to be seen if the “competent authority,” to use the words of the poorly drafted, ill-weighted Extradition Treaty, agrees.

It’s All Political: Julian Assange Appeals his Extradition – » The Australian Independent Media Network
Informed Comment

Europe dries up from climate change-driven drought

Meanwhile Andrew Bolt, Rowan Dean, etal keep pumping out the notion that global science is just a hoax, a new religion, and that the planet isn’t subject to man-made climate change,or that the warming we are experiencing is in fact good for the planet, why? Because if we accepted otherwise CO2 emitters and producers might just have to change the course of history and forgo the profits they have been making.

Climate change has drastically affected water levels in famed rivers across Europe. Whole territories are vanishing with the current drought — possibly the worst in 500 years, writes Dr Binoy Kampmark.

Europe dries up from climate change-driven drought
Informed Comment

Spears in place of Bridges: Australia, China and Fashioned Ignorance – » The Australian Independent Media Network

The reality is less rosy and more delicate. Australian diplomacy, practised in its ignorance, has little understanding about the importance of not losing face, and how it remains the precept that governs the cultural considerations of many of its neighbours. Coarseness, and an unqualified resolve to go to war in comradely fashion with the United States, remain dominant. Instead of being an accommodating bridge between East and West, Canberra remains a fashioned spear for Western power.

Spears in place of Bridges: Australia, China and Fashioned Ignorance – » The Australian Independent Media Network
Informed Comment

The Failings of Westminster: Scott Morrison’s Shadow Government – » The Australian Independent Media Network

The chances of having that broader debate are minimal. Albanese and his hounds smell blood, but the stains are not going to be that revealing. The Westminster model will be praised and defended; Morrison will be dismissed as pettily dictatorial. The fatuous notion of convention, the false assumption of gentlemanly conduct – for women do not feature in this – says everything about what is wrong about this rotten state of affairs. Inadvertently, Morrison acted consistently with, and enacted his belief: government cannot be trusted.

The Failings of Westminster: Scott Morrison’s Shadow Government – » The Australian Independent Media Network
Informed Comment

Europe Dries Up – » The Australian Independent Media Network

Globally, the earth is changing in violent, displacing fashion. Climate change will cause displacements in the order of tens of millions, if not more. Whole territories are vanishing, while other tracts of land are being exposed. Nature is not just being reordered but doing much of the reordering. What will humanity’s response be?

Europe Dries Up – » The Australian Independent Media Network
Antiquities

A Looting Matter: Cambodia’s Stolen Antiquities – » The Australian Independent Media Network

Tess Davis, director of the Antiquities Coalition, is blunt about the implications of this. “If I were a museum curator, I would check every Cambodian piece acquired after 1965 just to be safe; that’s how prolific [Latchford] was.” New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art is one institution that has admitted to doing so, “reviewing the pieces that came [into its] collection via Latchford and his associates.”

A Looting Matter: Cambodia’s Stolen Antiquities – » The Australian Independent Media Network
Informed Comment

Penal Assassination: The Gradual Effort to Kill Assange – » The Australian Independent Media Network

They really do want to kill him. Perhaps it is high time that his detractors and sceptics, proven wrong essentially from the outset, admit that the US imperium, along with its client states, is willing to see Julian Assange perish in prison. The locality and venue, for the purposes of this exercise, are not relevant. Like the Inquisition, the Catholic Church was never keen on soiling its hands, preferring the employ of non-church figures to torture their victims.

Penal Assassination: The Gradual Effort to Kill Assange – » The Australian Independent Media Network
Sri Lanka

Get Gota: Holding a War Criminal Accountable – » The Australian Independent Media Network

Sri Lanka

Between May 1989 and January 1990, Gotabaya oversaw a rule of forced disappearances (the report accounts for 1,042 victims), torture, and killing. A number of Sri Lankan government commissions took note of over 700 forced disappearances.

Source: Get Gota: Holding a War Criminal Accountable – » The Australian Independent Media Network

Informed Comment, Uncategorized

Overruling Roe v Wade: The International Dimension – » The Australian Independent Media Network

American influence isn’t as large as one imagines

The overruling of Roe v Wade by the US Supreme Court in Dobbs v Jackson Women’s Health Organization has created a sense that those outside the US will somehow draw inspiration from the example of the sacred foetus and the diminished autonomy of its carrier.

Groups such as MSI Reproductive Choices have also drawn a line in the sand of resistance. “To anyone who wants to deny someone’s right to make decisions about what is right for their body and their future, our message is ‘We are not going back’.” Dobbs, in short, may prove on the international stage to be more damp squib than firecracker.

Overruling Roe v Wade: The International Dimension – » The Australian Independent Media Network
Informed Comment

New Brooms, Old Stories: The Australian Labor Party and Julian Assange – » The Australian Independent Media Network

Opposition legal affairs spokesman George Brandis failed to identify any relevant law that might have been breached, either Australian or US. Liberty Victoria president Spencer Zifcak was “astonished” that a lawyer of presumed competence could have made such remarks. “There is no charge, there is no trial, there is no properly constituted court, and yet the Prime Minister deems it appropriate to say that Mr Assange has committed a criminal offence.”

Within less than a fortnight, the AFP, in concluding its investigation, informed Attorney-General Robert McClelland that “given the documents published to date are classified by the United States, the primary jurisdiction for any further investigation into the matter remains the United States.” After evaluating the material concerned, the federal police had failed to establish “the existence of any criminal offences where Australia would have jurisdiction.”

Source: New Brooms, Old Stories: The Australian Labor Party and Julian Assange – » The Australian Independent Media Network

Informed Comment

Reactionary succession — Peter Dutton, Australia’s new Opposition Leader

New Liberal Leader Peter Dutton has a history of cruelty and corruption, despite the mainstream media telling us we should give him a chance, writes Dr Binoy Kampmark.

Source: Reactionary succession — Peter Dutton, Australia’s new Opposition Leader

Informed Comment

The Great Teal Tsunami: Arise Australia’s Independents – » The Australian Independent Media Network

While the bruised LNP will lick their wounds and rue their ignorance of the community movement that gathered pace under their noses, Australia’s major parties will have to consider a new phenomenon: the non-career parliamentarian, one who enters parliament, not for party allegiance and faction but for voter representation and change. For the Westminster model of government, this is indeed a stunning novelty.

Source: The Great Teal Tsunami: Arise Australia’s Independents – » The Australian Independent Media Network