Post Tagged with: "Australia"

Scott Morrison and Australia’s Lobby Complex

Scott Morrison and Australia’s Lobby Complex

The former Australian Prime Minister, Scott Morrison, has been somewhat of an absentee in the Federal seat of Cook.  Since losing the May 2022 election, he has been aggressively chasing up contacts and deals on the consultancy circuit, bellyaching about the usual talking points: the gruesome China menace; defence matters; and, just to round it off for good measure, additional[Read More…]

by 07/05/2023 Comments are Disabled World
Joining the War Club: Australia’s HIMARS Purchase

Joining the War Club: Australia’s HIMARS Purchase

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[Read More…]

by 12/01/2023 Comments are Disabled World
Cowardly US Lackey Australian Labor Government Betrays Promises, Australia, Palestine, and Humanity

Cowardly US Lackey Australian Labor Government Betrays Promises, Australia, Palestine, and Humanity

A new Australian Labor Government was elected in May 2022, replacing an appalling Liberal Party-National Party Coalition Government. However after a mere 6 months decent, progressive, pro-environment and pro-peace Australians have already been disappointed by a cowardly and unprincipled Labor Government not meeting its pre-election rhetoric on matters ranging from banning nuclear weapons to strong action on climate change. Set[Read More…]

by 20/11/2022 Comments are Disabled World
Rich Australia Ignores 100,000 Preventable Deaths Annually: The Cost Of Neoliberalism & Lying

Rich Australia Ignores 100,000 Preventable Deaths Annually: The Cost Of Neoliberalism & Lying

Australia was recently number one in the world for median per capita wealth.  However, presently about 100,000 Australians die preventably each year from life-style choice and political choice reasons. Of these an estimated  23,000 die from poverty. Yet these horrible realities are effectively ignored by rich Australia that is blindly committed to neoliberalism that demands maximum freedom for the smart[Read More…]

by 29/09/2022 Comments are Disabled World
Australian PM Morrison’s Pseudo Coup By Secretly Grabbing 5 Ministerial Positions

Australian PM Morrison’s Pseudo Coup By Secretly Grabbing 5 Ministerial Positions

Australians were astonished  by the revelation in August that former Prime Minister Scott Morrison had secretly been appointed by the Governor General, General David Hurley, as a Minister for Health, Minister for Treasury,  Minister for Home Affairs, Minister for Finance, and Minister for Resources and Water. These extraordinary and secret actions, while legal,  have grossly violated the core principles of[Read More…]

by 01/09/2022 Comments are Disabled World
Advertising Gimmicks: Australia’s Nuclear-Powered Submarines

Advertising Gimmicks: Australia’s Nuclear-Powered Submarines

Never trust anything that comes out of a politician’s mouth in an election year.  Pledges are made to be broken; promises are made to seduce, not convince.  When the subject matter involves fictional submarines, even greater care should be taken. The prolonged, costly nightmare of Australia’s submarine policy took another turn on March 6.  The Defence Minister Peter Dutton could[Read More…]

by 07/03/2022 Comments are Disabled World
Backing Horses: Australia’s Solomon Islands Intervention

Backing Horses: Australia’s Solomon Islands Intervention

The history of humanitarian or policing missions is a history of taking sides, disruptive partiality and the forfeiture of the very object powers claim when intervening in another country.  Things become particularly absurd when the individual or government pleading for such help to an outside force is struggling to survive yet making grand statements about democracy and the like. Take[Read More…]

by 04/12/2021 Comments are Disabled World
Picture of Aussie soldier gulping beer from ‘prosthetic leg of dead Taliban fighter’

Australia’s Afghanistan War Crimes: A Case of Old Habits Die Hard?

Every time you start to believe that West is your model of morality, you get a jolt. Recent revelations of horrific war crimes committed by the Australian soldiers in Afghanistan where innocent men, women and children were deliberately and gruesomely killed are a rude reminder that West’s claim to morality is not just outright falsehood, their colonial habits of abuse[Read More…]

by 03/12/2020 Comments are Disabled World
 Australian War Crimes in Afghanistan: Redacted Brereton Report & 2 Centuries of Australian War Crimes Ignored

 Australian War Crimes in Afghanistan: Redacted Brereton Report & 2 Centuries of Australian War Crimes Ignored

  Australia has been rocked by the release of a heavily redacted report about the killing of 39 unarmed Afghan civilians or prisoners by some 25 elite  Australian Special Air Services (SAS)  soldiers. Any prosecutions will take years and will violate the scientific  principle of truth and systemic change rather than knee-jerk blame and shame. There is already huge Australian[Read More…]

by 28/11/2020 Comments are Disabled Imperialism
Warriors vs Australia’s CoverUps, War Crimes and Thug Culture

Warriors vs Australia’s CoverUps, War Crimes and Thug Culture

War crimes committed by the losers are punished and pilloried in news articles, books documentaries, movies while military coverups of atrocities by the victors are standard issue for evading justice. And cover-ups generally work – Australian war crimes against civilians are rarely exposed unless you happen to stumble across them such as the barely known 101 year old ANZAC massacre of Palestinian male[Read More…]

by 27/11/2020 Comments are Disabled World
Australia-China Relations: Down Under Squabbling

Australia-China Relations: Down Under Squabbling

These are proving testy times for Australian-Chinese relations.  Last week, Chinese authorities announced that an investigation would be conducted into claims that Australia has been using unfair dumping practices for its wine on the Chinese market.  This was not what Australian wine makers wanted to hear, given that exports of Australian wine to China grew from AU$268 million in 2015/16[Read More…]

by 29/08/2020 Comments are Disabled World
Battles over Barley: Australia, China and the Tariff Wars

Battles over Barley: Australia, China and the Tariff Wars

It promised to be bruising to both dignity and wallet.  However brazen Australian politicians have been drumming up support for an international inquiry into the origins of the novel coronavirus, the first ones to be slapped in anger would have to be those in agriculture.  Barley exporters find themselves facing a suffocating, and potentially market killing tariff, of 80.5 percent. [Read More…]

by 20/05/2020 Comments are Disabled World
FILE PHOTO: A sign stands outside the High Court of Australia in Canberra, Australia, October 15, 2014.  REUTERS/David Gray/File photo

Strafing Parliament: Australia’s High Court Citizenship Ruling

And they fell like ninepins.  Weeks of predictions, optimistic readings, and hopeful signs were dashed as the members of the highest court of Australia laid waste to members of Parliament. Citing a section in the Australian constitution that has become something of a heavy footnote in popular consciousness, the judges ruled five out of seven applicants ineligible to sit in[Read More…]

by 29/10/2017 Comments are Disabled World
The Demise of Civic Journalism: The Xenophon-Turnbull Deal

The Demise of Civic Journalism: The Xenophon-Turnbull Deal

It was never spectacular, but the Australian media scape is set to become duller, more contained, and more controlled with changes to the Broadcasting Services Act.  In an environment strewn with the corpses of papers and outlets strapped for cash, calls for reforming the media market have been heard across the spectrum. The foggy deception being perpetrated by the Turnbull[Read More…]

by 20/09/2017 1 comment World
The Flawed Institution: Australian Marriage And The Same-Sex Debate

The Flawed Institution: Australian Marriage And The Same-Sex Debate

It’s a pretty curious thing to see: marriage being defended at all.  Like slavery, and not necessarily inconsistent with it, marriage is an institution. It embraces codes. It imparts obligations, duties, and rights.  And it creeps up on you. In Australia, flawed campaigns are being waged in its name.  This has been occasioned by an absence of parliamentary will.  Abdicating[Read More…]

by 03/09/2017 Comments are Disabled Uncategorized
Loving The Bollard: Turnbull’s Anti-Terror Tool Kit

Loving The Bollard: Turnbull’s Anti-Terror Tool Kit

It has been a week of bollards.  And defence barriers.  And hedges and vegetation. No, not the radio garden hour, or the herbaceous borders special featured on prime time television, delivered by a bearded man with a facial forest so vast it could regenerate several lost species. This is the anti-terrorist flick of the week, and given that Australia’s Turnbull[Read More…]

by 27/08/2017 2 comments World
Fanciful Terrors: Bomb Plots And Australian Airport Security

Fanciful Terrors: Bomb Plots And Australian Airport Security

In the classroom of international security, Australia remains an infant wanting attention before the older hands.  During the Paris Peace talks, Prime Minister William Morris (“Billy”) Hughes screamed and hollered Australia’s wishes to gain greater concessions after its losses during the Great War, urging, among other things, a more punitive settlement for Germany. In the post-September 2001 age, recognition comes[Read More…]

by 31/07/2017 1 comment World
Having A Flutter: The Melbourne Cup And The Australian Gambler

Having A Flutter: The Melbourne Cup And The Australian Gambler

“In terms of prize money, the Melbourne Cup is worth more than the Grand National or any race in America, and it is far more popular in terms of national identity.” Richard Waterhouse, ABC Radio, Nov 3, 2015. An inspection of the hungry, jostling crowds gathering at the gates of the Flemington Race Course, Melbourne, gives a false sense of[Read More…]

by 01/11/2016 1 comment World
What It’s Like To Be A Muslim Australian

What It’s Like To Be A Muslim Australian

A recent Essential Research poll had found 49 per cent of Australians support a ban on Muslim immigration, including 60 per cent of Liberal-National Coalition voters, 40 per cent of Labor voters and 34 per cent of Greens voters agreed with the proposition that Muslim Australians were not integrating (assimilating) into “Australian culture” and pose a threat to Australia. It is[Read More…]

by 30/09/2016 Comments are Disabled World
Bungling The Australian Census

Bungling The Australian Census

Each country needs its exceptionalist message, its sui generis theme. We do something here no one else does, and such like. In Australia, there are many things deemed exceptional.  Compulsory voting, on pain of a fine, is one such case.  Compulsory voting in a census is another extension of that same philosophy. To not submit, and be damned by the[Read More…]

by 11/08/2016 1 comment World
Refugee Trauma On Nauru: The Leaked Incident Reports

Refugee Trauma On Nauru: The Leaked Incident Reports

“Do I have to kill myself to go to Australia?” Asylum seeker, Nauru, March 2, 2015 Human sensibility has been given another sound beating with the leak of 2,116 incident reports from Australia’s remorseless detention camp on Nauru.  The reports total some 8,000 pages covering the period of May 2013 to October 2015 and were published by the Guardian on[Read More…]

by 10/08/2016 1 comment Human Rights
Rubbishing Pauline Hanson: The Campaign Continues

Rubbishing Pauline Hanson: The Campaign Continues

A virus of populism, as it has come to be called, has rattled established classes across the countries of Europe, the United States, and, to a lesser extent, Australia. The latter case remains striking for the return of the reactionary Pauline Hanson to office last month in the July 2 elections. Much of this was the subject of the documentary Pauline Hanson: Please Explain!, which aired on the SBS network on July 31.

by 02/08/2016 1 comment World
Dylan Voller, strapped to a mechanical restraint chair in Darwin’s notorious Don Dale juvenile unit was once a football-loving teenager, but was shackled and placed in a ‘spit hood’ in custody. Picture: ABC

The Scourge Of Youth Detention: The Northern Territory, Torture, And Australia’s Detention Disease

“What we’re changing is a culture in an organisation within the youth detention system and I think we’ve come a long way in that time.” Adam Giles, NT Chief Minister, ABC News, Jul 26, 2016 It was an image that would not have been out of place in the sickly procession of pictures that came out of Abu Ghraib and[Read More…]

by 27/07/2016 1 comment Human Rights
Resurgent Pauline Hanson,  Australian Islamophobia And Terror Hysteria

Resurgent Pauline Hanson, Australian Islamophobia And Terror Hysteria

What can decent people do? Decent people must (a) inform everyone they can, (b) urge and apply zero tolerance for racism and lying, and (c) urge and apply Boycotts, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) against all people, politicians, parties, companies and corporations that are actively or passively complicit in racism and lying. Decent, anti-racist Australians will vote 1 Green and put the Coalition last.

by 23/07/2016 1 comment World
Australia’s Malcolm Turnbull: The Failure Of Success

Australia’s Malcolm Turnbull: The Failure Of Success

The term “mandate” has been sluicing through the Australian electoral system in its predictable wash-up. In that particular country, it never matters whether one wins by one vote or a hundred thousand: everyone has a “clear mandate” to do what they damn well wish they think they were encouraged to do. It is worth remembering that the Australian prime minister,[Read More…]

by 19/07/2016 2 comments World
Neoliberal Australia Re-elects War Criminal, Climate Criminal, Pro-Apartheid, Child-abusing Coalition Government

Neoliberal Australia Re-elects War Criminal, Climate Criminal, Pro-Apartheid, Child-abusing Coalition Government

  In July 2016 a  substantially  ignorant, greedy,  racist,  pro-Zionist, US lackey, extreme right-wing and neoliberal Murdochracy Australia re-elected (albeit by a wafer-thin margin) a mendacious, corrupt, anti-equity, anti-science, anti-environment, pro-war, war criminal, pro-coal, climate criminal, human rights-abusing, pro-Apartheid and child-abusing Coalition Government. Those supporting the Coalition are on a continuum from egregious ignorance and stupidity to homicidal greed. Responsibility[Read More…]

by 19/07/2016 1 comment Uncategorized
Banning And Banishing: The Nonsense About Muslims

Banning And Banishing: The Nonsense About Muslims

He was the kingpin of the whole affair by suggesting it. In December 2015, the US Republican presumptive nominee for President, Donald Trump, came up with that daft suggestion which seems so utterly devoid of informed meaning.  Ban Muslims from entering the United States and the phenomenon of terrorism would somehow be abated. His prepared statement was characteristically dramatic in[Read More…]

by 19/07/2016 3 comments Human Rights