The Lasting Condition: Drought in Australia
Humans are a funny species. They create settlements along fault lines that, on moving, can create catastrophe, killing thousands. They construct homes facing rivers that will, at some point, break…
Dr Binoy Kampmark
Trillion Dollar Companies: The Apple Empire and Concentrated Markets
It seems a distant reality, or nightmare now: a company that was near defunct in 1996, now finding itself at the imperial pinnacle of the corporate ladder. Then, publications were…
Fought to the Table: Talks with the Taliban
“Attempting to control rural areas in Afghanistan always eventually ends up boiling down to personal survival.” Evan McAllister, former Marine staff sergeant, New York Times, July 28, 2018 It genuinely…
Thriving on Dark Web: The My Health Record and Data Insecurity
Data is rarely inert. It moves, finds itself diverting, adjusting and adapting to users and distributors. Ultimately, as unspectacular and banal as it might be, data sells, pushing the price…
The Death of the Investigative Journalist: Channel Nine’s Takeover of Fairfax
The Yes Minister series portraying the skulduggery of Whitehall during the Thatcher years throws up a salient reminder how certain things do not mix. Should the art portfolio be slotted…
Plans for Attack: US Plans for Striking Iran
The world of the terrifying hypothetical is programmatically standard in the Trump White House. Periods of tense calm are followed by careless flights of fury, digs and remonstrations. Mortal enemies…
Findings and Non-Findings: The MH370 Report
It does little to allay the grief of relatives and friends, but the MH370 report on the doomed, and ever spectral Malaysian passenger liner merely added smidgens of further speculation. …
Embellishing Crime: Melbourne’s “African Gang” Problem
Always trust the handy anecdote to overwhelm reality with force and false persuasiveness. The taxi driver irate at the latest opportunistic scribble in a Rupert Murdoch rag is bound to…
Electing the Cornered Tiger: Imran Khan in Pakistani Politics
Tariq Ali, whilst having a lunch in Knightsbridge with the Pakistani cricket colossus, Imran Khan, suggested that retirement should not be too problematic for him. (Khan had seemed gloomy, deep…
The Middle Man: The Jurisprudence of Justice Anthony Kennedy
“At the heart of liberty is the right to define one’s own concept of existence, of meaning, of the universe, and of the mystery of human life.” This near-kitsch description…
Conferencing, Extortion and IPSA 2018: The Meat Market of the World Congress
It may well go down as one of the most appalling conferences in the history of the International Political Science Association. The World Congress is one of those hot air…
Ecuador’s Agenda: Squeezing and Surrendering Assange
It is perhaps typical in a time where a star of the fleshy celluloid wonder Baywatch, heavy in bust and known for her sexual adventures, should feature as a political…
Shaking Establishments: The Ocasio-Cortez Effect
Dana Milbank wrote it off as a victory of demographics, a minor, inconsequential point which left the “down-the-line liberal” Rep. Joe Crowley in its wake, a simple ploy that avoids…
Helsinki Theatrics: Trump meets Putin
The first official meeting between Russian President Vladimir Putin and his counterpart Donald Trump was a fairly casual, unpeopled affair, absent bureaucrats and note takers. This was what both wanted…
The Woes of Luka Modrić: Croatia, Nationalism and Football
Juraj Vrdoljak of Telesport was convinced. “I think half the population didn’t show up to work on the morning after the win against England.” The victory had inspired early shop…
Stomping in Britain: Donald Trump and May’s Brexit
What a rotten guest, but then again, that was to be expected. Ahead of his visit to Britain, there was some indignation that US President Donald Trump should even be…
Making Heavy Weather: Boris Johnson the Despoiler
There is a certain haunting similarity between the President of the United States and the now former foreign secretary of the United Kingdom, Boris Johnson. This does not merely extend…
Giant Killing, Heroes and Teams at the 2018 World Cup
They have been falling like ninepins at one of the most unpredictable World Cups in generations. Even before the kick-off in the tournament, Italy’s absence was conspicuous. By the time…
Soft Brexits and Hard Realities: The Tory Revolt
It was meant to be an away day at Chequers in total hermetic isolation, an effort on the part of UK Prime Minister Theresa May to sketch some common ground…
Rescues, Caves and Celebrity Salvation
It all risks becoming pornographic, looped and re-run with an obsessive eye for updates and detail about despair and hope. The twenty-four hour news cycle tends to encourage this sort…
Keeping Your Refugees: Macron, Francafrique and Euro-African Relations
Ties between Europe and Africa have never been rosy. A relationship based on predatory conquest and the exploitation of resources (slave flesh, minerals, and such assortments) is only ever going…
The Lures of Kleptocracy: Malaysia’s Najib Condition
Words can be teasing in their meaning. In the realm of political and financial discussion, they can become absurdly changing. Take Malaysia’s political status. On the surface, all looks delightfully…
Send in the Troops! Deploying the ADF against Rioters
Such moves should trouble any constructive dissenter and civil libertarian: the vesting of powers in a military force to be used against domestic disturbances. While the United States has a…
Democrats Against Assange: Influencing US-Ecuador Relations
Such a historical twist, but one that deserves its iniquitous slot in the history books. No secret has been made about US policy towards Julian Assange and WikiLeaks, which continues…
Viktor Orbán’s Soros Problem
Where there are refugees and asylum seekers, there will be the assistants, the exploiters and the opportunists. The global anti-refugee sentiment has become an industrial complex, well-funded, sharpened and vicious. …
The Next Step: The Campaign for Julian Assange
The modern detainee in a political sense has to be understood in the abstract. Those who take to feats of hacking, publishing and articulating positions on the issue of institutional…
Evading Medical Care: Australia’s Refugee Arrangements with Taiwan
It is a credit to the venality of Australia’s refugee policy that much time is spent on letting others do what that particular country ought to be doing. For a…
Infant Armour: Jacinda Ardern, Baby Madness and Myth
The Jacinda Ardern phenomenon, clumsily dubbed Jacindamania, shows no signs of abating. Journalists have long given up bothering about policy analysis regarding New Zealand’s prime minister, instead focusing on pregnancy…
The Catholic Church in Resistance: Priests, Child Abuse, and Breaking the Seal of the Confessional
The tradition is represented as noble, the confiding link between confessor and penitent, a bridge never to be broken, even under pain of death. Taken that way, the confessional is…
Leaving the UN Human Rights Council
The margin between what is a human right as an inalienable possession, and how it is seen in political terms is razor fine. In some cases, the distinctions are near…
Rocking the G7: Trump Stomps His Allies
Disruption, disturbance, eruption, the words crowning the presidency of Donald J. Trump, who has effectively demonstrated an idea made famous by Nazi doodler of law and political theorist Carl Schmitt:…
Pushing Huawei Out: Australia, the Solomon Islands and the Internet
Be wary of the Chinese technological behemoth, goes the current cry from many circles in Australia’s parliament. Cyber security issues are at stake, and the eyes of Beijing are getting…
Meeting on the Island of Death From Behind: The Kim-Trump Summit
Everything about this summit is in the showy warm-up run. “I am on my way to Singapore,” tweets US President Donald J. Trump, “where we have a chance to achieve…
The Ramsay Twist: Australian University Funding and Western Civilisation
There is a lot of tattle going on about why the Australian National University rebuffed, after a series of talks, the offer for the establishment of a specific bachelors degree…
Elite Atrocities: Australia’s Special Forces in Afghanistan
“Further into the Afghanistan mission, after multiple deployments, soldiers began to refer to members going ‘up the Congo’.” Chris Masters, The Sydney Morning Herald, Jun 9, 2018 They operate with…
The Food of Movement: Anthony Bourdain’s Universal Eater
Bruce Chatwin considered movement the indispensable feature of the human species. Sedentary natures killed through asphyxiation; a refusal to move suggested an acceptance of death. Walking he considered a virtue;…
Dazzled by Tech: Universities, Googlification and Microsoft
The mechanical, robotic striving of university politburos and their jack boot managers have always been interesting when it comes to one particular topic: the role of technology and its adoption. …
The Power of Self-Pardon: Trump’s Novel View
“If a president was dumb enough to pardon himself that would be such an arrogant statement of power that the House would probably impeach him in a week and…
Cover Ups and Confessions: Pope Francis and Child Abuse
It is the season for exposures and exposes, and the Catholic Church has been making regular ripples of the wrong and undeniably crude sort. Globally, the church is finding itself…
Universities, Branding and Saudi Arabia
The modern university is a tertiary colonising institution. Like the old mercantilist bodies – the Dutch East India Company and its equivalents – the educational world is there to be…
Donald Trump, Summits and Cancellations
It was the sort of party you would be reluctant to turn up to, and its cancellation would have caused a sigh of relief. But when the US president replicates…
States of Cruelty: The Dead Refugees of Manus
In those seemingly interminable refugee debates being held in various countries, cruelty is pure theatre. It is directed, stage managed, the victims treated as mere marionettes in a play of…
Eternal Disappearance: MH370 and the Hangar Gossipers
It has fuelled enough speculation to fill libraries and populate databases at catchy speed. The disappearance of MH370 en route from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing on March 8, 2014, one…
Tom Wolfe the Parajournalist
As is the nature of his creepy totality, President Donald Trump has a habit of suffusing the obituaries of the famous and pampered. Tom Wolfe, it is said by such…
Unsettling the Summits: John Bolton’s Libya Solution
The inevitable stop, start and stuttering of the Korean peace process was bound to manifest itself soon after the hugs, expansive smiles and sympathetic back rubs. Dates have been set…
Remembering Big Dead Place
The image of Antarctica in common circulation is environmental and utopian. The scientist of valour, the investigator thirsting for discovery in a litmus test environment that will give warning about…
The Spectre of Torture: The Gina Haspel Hearings
“I’m not going to sit here with the benefit of hindsight and judge the very good people who made hard decisions who were running the agency in very extraordinary circumstances.”…
The Mummy Returns: Mahathir Mohamad and the Malaysian Elections
It was a victory, but it could hardly count as a truly revolutionary one. Grizzled, aged but formidably stirring, Mahathir Mohamad, Malaysia’s former prime minister, is set to form government…
Withdrawal Symptoms: Trump And The Iran Nuclear Deal
Hot on the heels of the Benjamin Netanyahu “nuclear archive” show supposedly revealing Iranian perfidy, US President Donald Trump added succour to the Israeli cause by promising to withdraw from…
Nobel Nonsense: Nominating Donald Trump for the Peace Prize
It seems like rich nonsense, but should peace be attained on the Korean peninsula, with arrangements entrenched to ensure durability as opposed to unconvincing window dressing, President Donald Trump might…
Irresistible Urges: Surveilling Australia’s Citizens
The authoritarian misfits in the Turnbull government have again rumbled and uttered suspicions long held: Australian residents and citizens are not to be trusted, and the intelligence services should start…
Macron’s Travels in Trumpland
All smiles and hugs is the current French President, Emmanuel Macron. In the White House, there seemed to be an emotional equation generated by the supposedly warm relationship between President…
The Korean Promise: The Meeting in Panmunjom
It seems, and certainly feels like a distant number of months since a panel of experts noshed and chatted over how best to overcome the nuclear impasse that pitted North…
Clamouring against Russia: The Cyber Attack Platform
In a time when such revelations as those of Edward Snowden pass a person’s lips with ease and awareness, political clamouring for action and measures against Russia on the subject…
The Unintentional Extremist: Israel Folau, the Bible and Homophobia
What limits opinions? Especially by sportspeople, who are often confused for geniuses of the mind and ambassadors of tact outside their very limited field of endeavour. (Yes, he can dribble…
Macron’s Syria Game
There is a certain bullishness in French circles these days, even if there was an initial attempt, with the Macron government, to calm matters down. The need to assert Gallic…
Blind Assault: Trump Strikes Syria
Feeling that some display of force was needed, US president Donald Trump issued orders on Friday to demonstrate some form of muscle, albeit exercised some thousands of miles away. “A…
Pacific Moves: China, Vanuatu And Australia
Washington’s vigilant deputy, doing rounds on the beat in the Pacific, has been irate of late. The central issue here is the continuing poking around of China in an area…
Indulgent Violence: The Legacy of Winnie Madikizela-Mandela
There was nothing of the Siddhartha about her. Modest and sombre middle ways are not the stuff of revolutionary ardour. Winnie Madikizela-Mandela’s mark on history was always going to render…
YouTube, Censorship And Nasim Aghdam
“People like me are not good for big business, like for animal business, medicine business and for many other businesses. That’s why they are discriminating and censoring us.” Nasim Najafi…
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