On February 20, it was clear that things were not going to be made easy for Julian Assange, the WikiLeaks founder who infuriated the US imperium, the national security establishment, and a stable of journalists upset that he had cut their ill-tended lawns. He was too ill to attend what may well be the final appeal against his extradition from the United Kingdom to the United States. Were he to be sent to the US, he faces a possible sentence amounting to 175 years arising from 18 venally cobbled charges, 17 spliced from that archaic horror, the Espionage Act of 1917.

The appeal to the High Court, comprising Justice Jeremy Johnson and Dame Victoria Sharp, challenges the extradition order by the Home Secretary and the conclusions of District Judge Vanessa Baraitser who, despite ordering his release on risks posed to him on mental health grounds, fundamentally agreed with the prosecution. He was, Varaitser scorned, not a true journalist. (Absurdly, it would seem for the judge, journalists never publish leaked information.) He had exposed the identities of informants. He had engaged in attempts to hack computer systems. In June 2023, High Court justice, Jonathan Swift, thought it inappropriate to rehear the substantive arguments of the trial case made by defence.

Assange’s attorneys had informed the court that he simply could not attend in person, though it would hardly have mattered. His absence from the courtroom was decorous in its own way; he could avoid being displayed like a caged specimen reviled for his publishing feats. The proceedings would be conducted in the manner of appropriate panto, with dress and procedure to boot.

Unfortunately, as things chugged along, the two judges were seemingly ill versed in the field they were adjudicating. Their ignorance was telling on, for instance, the views of Mark Pompeo, whose bilious reaction to WikiLeaks when director of the Central Intelligence Agency involved rejecting the protections of the First Amendment of the US Constitution to non-US citizens. (That view is also held by the US prosecutors.) Such a perspective, argued Assange’s legal team, was a clear violation of Article 10 of the European Convention of Human Rights. 

They were also surprised to be informed that further charges could be added to the indictment on his arrival to the United States, including those carrying the death penalty. To this could be added other enlightening surprises for the judicial bench: the fact that rules of admissibility might be altered to consider material illegally obtained, for instance, through surveillance; that Assange might also be sentenced for an offence he was never actually tried for.

Examples of espionage case law were submitted as precedents to buttress the defence, with Edward Fitzgerald KC calling espionage a “pure political offence” which barred extradition in treaties Britain had signed with 158 nation states.

The case of David Shayler, who had been in the employ of the British domestic intelligence service MI5, saw the former employee prosecuted for passing classified documents to The Mail on Sunday in 1997 under the Official Secrets Act. These included the names of various agents, that the agency kept dossiers on various UK politicians, including Labour ministers, and that the British foreign intelligence service, MI6, had conceived of a plan to assassinate Libya’s Colonel Muammar Gaddafi. When the UK made its extradition request to the French authorities, they received a clear answer from the Cour d’Appel: the offence charged was found to be political in nature.

Mark Summers KC also emphasised the point that the “prosecution was motivated to punish and inhibit the exposure of American state-level crimes”, ample evidence of which was adduced during the extradition trial, yet ignored by both Baraitser and Swift. Baraitser brazenly ignored evidence of discussions by US intelligence officials about a plot to kill or abduct Assange. 

For Summers, chronology was telling: the initial absence of any prosecution effort by the Obama administration, despite empanelling a grand jury to investigate WikiLeaks; the announcement by the International Criminal Court that it would be investigating potential crimes committed by US combatants in Afghanistan in 2016, thereby lending gravity to Assange’s disclosures; and the desire to kill or seek the publisher’s extradition after the release of the Vault 7 files detailing various espionage tools of the CIA. 

With Pompeo’s apoplectic declaration that WikiLeaks was a hostile, non-state intelligence service, the avenue was open for a covert targeting of Assange in the Ecuadorian embassy in London. The duly hatched rendition plan led to the prosecution, which proved “selective” in avoiding, for instance, the targeting of newspaper outlets such as Freitag, or the website Cryptome. In Summer’s view, “This is not a government acting on good faith pursuing a legal path.”

When it came to discussing the leaks, the judges revealed a deep-welled obliviousness about what Assange and WikiLeaks had actually done in releasing the US State Department cables. For one thing, the old nonsense that the unredacted, or poorly redacted material had resulted in damage was skirted over, not to mention the fact that Assange had himself insisted on a firm redaction policy. No inquiry has ever shown proof that harm came to any US informant, a central contention of the US Department of Justice. Nor was it evident to the judges that the publication of the cables had first taken place in Cryptome, once it was discovered that reporters from The Guardian had injudiciously revealed the password to the unredacted files in their publication.

Two other points also emerged in the defence submission: the whistleblower angle, and that of foreseeability. Consider, Summers argued hypothetically, the situation where Chelsea Manning, whose invaluable disclosures WikiLeaks published, had been considered by the European Court of Human Rights. The European Union’s whistleblower regime, he contended, would have considered the effect of harm done by violating an undertaking of confidentiality with the exposure of abuses of state power. Manning would have likely escaped conviction, while Assange, having not even signed any confidentiality agreements, would have had even better prospects for acquittal.

The issue of foreseeability, outlined in Article 7 of the ECHR, arose because Assange, his team further contends, could not have known that publishing the cables would have triggered a lawsuit under the Espionage Act. That said, a grand jury had refused to indict the Chicago Times in 1942 for publishing an article citing US naval knowledge of Japanese plans to attack Midway Island. Then came the Pentagon Papers case in 1971. While Summers correctly notes that, “The New York Times was never prosecuted,” this was not for want for trying: a grand jury was empanelled with the purpose of indicting the Times reporter Neil Sheehan for his role in receiving classified government material. Once revelations of government tapping of whistleblower Daniel Ellsberg was revealed, the case collapsed. All that said, Article 7 could provide a further ground for barring extradition.

February 21 gave lawyers for the US the chance to reiterate the various, deeply flawed assertions about Assange’s publication activities connected with Cablegate (the “exposing informants” argument), his supposedly non-journalistic activities and the integrity of diplomatic assurances about his welfare were he to be extradited. The stage for the obscene was duly set.

By James Moore  

I do not understand. Perhaps, I never will. Does anyone?

As Russia kills innocents in Ukraine and dissidents within its own borders, a former American president refuses to criticize the murderous dictator. Maybe, it’s because he idolizes the brutality and wants some of his own to deploy for political purposes on American soil. In the U.S. House, there is a refusal to provide military resources to save Ukraine from Russia’s expanding totalitarianism while the American government has already armed Israel’s attack on Gaza to the point the wider world has begun to view it as the facilitation of a genocide. Israel, however, refuses to be chastened even by the humanitarian concerns only recently expressed by its most significant benefactor, U.S. taxpayers. Meanwhile, the U.S., once the moral and democratic guidepost for other nations, wants to sanction South Africa for calling out genocide in Gaza. The contradictions and hypocrisies can hardly be catalogued or annotated.

Who can keep up?

But Russia’s Putin may have hastened his own demise with his murder of opposition leader Alexi Navalny. Political movements often crystalize with the acquisition of a martyr. Navalny, even after being imprisoned in a six-by-seven foot cell after an attempted poisoning, never relented in his fight against Putin’s control. He may have been sent to a prison north of the Arctic Circle, beaten and poisoned until he died, but his words and aspirations for his country have been amplified in death. Russia cannot incarcerate all the citizens who will begin to gather in the streets and demand democracy and freedom, unless the entire nation is turned into a gulag. Deposing Putin seems more of a possibility for the Russian people today than while Navalny was drawing breath, and his wife, fearlessly, has taken up his cause and his message.

Putin will not stop killing his detractors and opponents, however, until he is out of power or out of breath. The threat of a nuclear event will also not be eliminated while he controls Russia’s military and is able to continue selling oil to India and China. Sanctions are not reducing his oppressions, and in this country, a former president sees himself as a Navalny-like hero instead of the Putinesque villain. He wants authoritarian rule like Putin but to be lionized as if he were principled like Navalny. How does that work? Putin has found creative ways to get his political opponents to jump out of high rise buildings or fly in planes that point at the ground and the political right in the U.S. still aligns itself with the murderous machinations. A former American network TV host flies to Moscow and praises the dictator in an interview that amounts to a kind of journalistic fellatio, which encourages American MAGATs to see in Putin a powerful and decisive leader. The saner political world wonders how much more time is left on Putin’s clock before there is another Russian revolution.

While American politicians praise the defiance of Navalny and his courage of speaking truth to power, our judicial and political systems continue to push for the extradition and prosecution of Julian Assange, who shared a truth that American power did not want made public. The Wikileaks founder distributed 2007 videos of U.S. helicopter pilots gunning down two journalists and Iraqis in the streets. The total dead was eighteen civilians, which included two Reuters reporters and two children. The Apache helicopter pilots mistook shouldered video cameras for handheld RPG launchers, but also later laughed at the killings they had committed. Gunships had reportedly been dispatched to the area because U.S. soldiers had been dealing with small arms fire in that location earlier in the day. Assange and Wikileaks released a 39 minute video (below) showing the attack, which prompted global outrage.

Assange, who is considered by many publishers and reporters to be a hero for committing an act of journalism, is, instead, facing extradition from the UK to the U.S. and likely prosecution that could put him in prison for 170 years. The U.S. is in court in London pressing for Assange to be extradited to face numerous charges in America. We do not necessarily honor people in America who risk much to reveal the truth. Rather, we prosecute them because it risks revealing the horrors and the lies of our geo-political ambitions. Assange received the videos, and more than 750,000 classified and unclassified but sensitive documents, from Chelsea Manning, a U.S. Army soldier who was convicted under the Espionage Act. Manning spent seven years in prison until her sentence was commuted by President Barack Obama. Assange, meanwhile, held out with diplomatic immunity in the Ecuadorian Embassy in London while the CIA plotted to have him kidnapped or killed.

There is a tradition of American citizens releasing information of value to the public when it will inform them of the actions of their government that might be improper. There is also a tradition of prosecuting those citizens, emotionally and legally, whether it is Edward Snowden, who defected to Russia after revealing global surveillance operations by the CIA and NSA, or it’s Reality Winner, a U.S. Air Force veteran who released classified information to journalists about Russian hacking of the 2016 presidential election. She received the longest prison sentence ever imposed for an unauthorized release of government information to the media, which would have little reason to suspect Russian meddling in U.S. elections without Winner’s actions. There is also, of course, Daniel Ellsberg, who in 1973 was charged under the Espionage Act for releasing the Pentagon Papers, an extensive analysis by the Department of Defense on flawed U.S. decision-making policies regarding the War in Vietnam. He was facing 115 years in prison until his prosecutors and investigators bungled evidence collection and all changes had to be dropped, even though the New York Times and Washington Post had published his massive report, which hastened the end of our Southeast Asian tragedy.

There ought to be no difficulty in deciding what kind of actions or character comprise heroism. They are definitely not contained in spray-tanned conmen who compare themselves and their 91 indictments to the heroic resistance of Alexi Navalny to the Russian killer of humans and facts. Heroes are not American politicians who decry the murder of Navalny for confronting Putin with facts while denouncing the release of information by Assange, who saw wrongs in how the U.S. was prosecuting the Iraq War, an invasion and occupation based upon a demonstrably false claim of weapons of mass destruction. Governments must, of necessity, keep some secrets to maintain advantage over adversaries and control threats to sovereignty but that hidden information ought not be protected when it hides facts that deceive citizens and their rights to know what their government is doing and why.

American history is replete, though, with the elimination and assassination of inspiring leaders who were taking the country in an informed direction toward equality of opportunity. Abraham Lincoln and John Kennedy, exactly a century apart, had messages the nation wanted but other interests did not, whether it was JFK’s peace efforts to end the Cold War or Lincoln’s to reunite a nation and free people from slavery. Our own CIA was likely culpable in JFK’s death, and, according to the family of Martin Luther King, the civil rights leader was assassinated by the FBI, which had been listening to his plans with endless wiretaps. Bobby Kennedy’s death ended any hope of finding the truth about his brother’s murder in Dallas but there were other inspiring American figures who were wronged for confronting wrongs. Muhammad Ali was stripped of his heavyweight boxing title and lost years of earnings and competing because he resisted the draft and the War in Vietnam, and now we are engaged in funding a genocide in Gaza by Israel even as we proclaim our outrage of Putin’s assault on Ukraine.

It’s a sad country that has no heroes, and an even sadder one that needs them.

This article was originally published on Texas to the world.

The imaginative faculties of standard Australian politicians retreat to some strange, deathly place on certain issues. In that wasteland, they are often unrecoverable. Like juveniles demanding instant reward, these representatives find complexity hideous, troubling, discomforting. Focus on the prospect of immediate electoral gain, the crude punch, the bruising, the hurt. That, in sum, is Canberra’s policy towards refugees.

With this month’s appearance of 39 asylum seekers on some of the most remote shorelines on the planet in Western Australia, the customary wells of hysteria were again being tapped for political gain. “Here we go again,” lamented the Tasmanian Greens Senator Nick McKim. “A boat arrives with desperate refugees who need our help and we’re suddenly in a ‘political crisis’ because the media said so.”

One desperate politician was opposition leader Peter Dutton, who wondered how these dangerous subversives could have ever arrived undetected in the first place. “The government has all sorts of problems,” he crowed. “It’s clear that they don’t have the same surveillance in place that we had when we were in government.”

Dutton found it “inconceivable a boat of this size, carrying 40-plus people, could make it to the mainland without there being any detection.” The insinuation is hard to ignore: the Labor government permitted the arrival to take place.

The 2022-3 Australia Border Force annual report had noted a reduction of “maritime patrol days” by 6% and aerial patrols by 14%, the result of vessel maintenance, personnel shortages and logistical difficulties when operating in remote parts off the coast. Overall budgetary costs for the ABF have also been adjusted to account for the fact that the 2022-3 budget was, as Home Affairs department chief finance officer Stephanie Cargill explained in May year, “overspent”. 

The ABF chief, Michael Outram, has even gone so far as to reproach Dutton for his assessment about funding cuts, which deceptively, even mendaciously suggest belt tightening on the part of the Albanese government. “Border Force funding is currently the highest it’s been since its establishment in 2015 and in the last year, the ABF has received additional funding totalling hundreds of millions of dollars, to support maritime and land based operations.”

All in all, there has hardly been a softening of the brutal policy that presumptively and prematurely judges undocumented naval arrivals as unworthy. As the ABF statement on the arrivals notes with customary severity, “Australia’s tough border protection policies means that no one who travels unauthorised by boat will ever be allowed to settle permanently in Australia. The only way to travel to Australia is legally, with an Australian visa.”

The dubious rationale for maintaining the policy, formally known as Operation Sovereign Borders, is still very much in place. “Australia,” the ABF continues to explain, “remains committed to protecting its borders, stamping out people smuggling and preventing vulnerable people from risking their lives on futile journeys. The people smuggling business model is built on the exploitation of information and selling lies to vulnerable people who will give up everything to risk their lives at sea.” 

Rear Admiral Brett Sonter, who leads Operation Sovereign Borders, had also stated that nothing has changed. “The mission of Operation Sovereign Borders remains the same today as it was when it was established in 2013: protect Australia’s borders, combat people smuggling in our region, and importantly, prevent people from risking their lives at sea.” To suggest otherwise would create an “alternative narrative” susceptible to exploitation “by criminal people smugglers to deceive potential irregular immigrants and convince them to risk their lives and travel to Australia by boat.”

This became a point of contention for Prime Minister Anthony Albanese, who decided to give Dutton a parliamentary scalding by suggesting that his opponents were “just full of nonsense, and they should stop being a cheer squad for people, encouraging people smuggling.”

Such “business models”, as they are derisively and demagogically called, are the natural consequence of a yearning to flee. It is a yearning that is being globally punished, notably by wealthier states less than keen to accept asylum seekers. Canberra’s savage approach to the problem – non-settlement in Australia of those eventually found to be refugees and detaining individuals in concentration camps in the Pacific – has become the envy of border protection fetishists. The British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak, for instance, dreams of an Australia-styled solution that will involve “turning the boats back” and deporting asylum seekers to Rwanda. Unfortunately for him, and most fortunately for humanitarians, an army of lawyers and judges have frustrated his vision. 

The border fetishists also make a crucial omission. The people smugglers, who are of all stripes of opportunism and exploitation rather than some monolithic bloc, are merely facilitating the provisions of the United Nations Refugee Convention. All who arrive should not be discriminated against on the basis of how they arrive or their backgrounds – the articles of the Convention state as much – yet Australia’s border policy remains persistently cruel and defiant. Whenever a boat appears with a small cargo full of desperate individuals who make it to land, the fantasies of invasion, unwarranted intrusion and unwanted infiltration catch alight. It was high time they were snuffed out.

He was sweet and well meaning, but he was old. He was hazy. His memory was poor. Doddering, confused, the self-proclaimed leader of the Free World seemed ready to check into a retirement village. That, at least, is the thick insinuation of the Special Counsel’s report on President Joe Biden’s mishandling of classified documents when vice president during the Obama administration.

The findings of the Special Counsel Robert Hur were not punitive. But they were laceratingly wounding. It seemed to resemble more of a nurse’s assessment of whether you need an upgrade in aged-care treatment, a bolstering of services for a person in declining years. (“Have you lost your mind, dear?”)

During the course of the investigation, things did not get better. “In his interview with our office, Mr. Biden’s memory was worse. He did not remember when he was vice president, forgetting on the first day of the interview when his term ended (‘if it was 2013 – when did I stop being Vice President?’), and forgetting on the second day of the interview when his term began (‘in 2009, am I still Vice President?’).”      

At an ill-tempered press conference, Biden insisted that his memory was “fine”, that Hur should never have asked such questions as whether the president could recall when his son died and that he was “well meaning. And I’m an elderly man. And I know what the hell I’m doing. I’ve been president – I put this country back on its feet.”

The picture is not a good one. But then again, when was it? Prior to coming to power, Biden already had a bookshelf list of bungles, gaffes and misjudgements. The only question looming behind was the degree of intent behind them. In 1987, he notoriously plagiarised much of a speech by the then leader of the British Labor Party, Neil Kinnock and, to show he was on a hot streak, generously decorated his academic record from Syracuse Law School. Despite describing this as “much ado about nothing,” he withdrew from the contest for the Democratic presidential nomination that September.  

His campaign team, terrified that he might verbally snare himself leading up to the 2020 election, tried their best to insulate him from penetrative public scrutiny. This was very much aided by the ravages and restrictions of the pandemic, which afforded him the perfect excuse to operate in conditions of masked isolation. 

As commander-in-chief matters have only worsened. Figures, for example, were airily revised – a million dead US residents and citizens from the ravages of COVID-19 became the somewhat reduced figure of “over 100”. World leaders dead or alive were swapped in Biden’s memory channel – a flattering form of death revival, and a denigration of the living. Biden, for instance, confused the current French president, Emmanuel Macron, with the late François Mitterrand before a campaign rally in Las Vegas. 

His geographical recall was not too good either. “Right after I was elected, I went to a G7 meeting in southern England. And I sat down and said, ‘America is back!’ and Mitterrand from Germany – I mean France – looked at me and said, ‘How long are you back for?’” 

In terms of wars, he has remarked that Russia’s Vladimir Putin was “losing the war in Iraq”, which would have surprised the Russians, Ukrainians and everybody else. More could have been made by the Republicans about this in Congress, but then again, their aged warriors are hardly endowed with brainbox memories of sound recall or cognition either.

Other mishaps could cause titters of amusement – the harmless, dotty chap who muddles the facts, lighting up pub conversation. During his April visit to Ireland last year, light entertainment was caused by his confusion between the terroristic Black and Tan enforcers during the Irish War of Independence (1919-21) and the All Blacks, New Zealand’s fabled rugby team. The remarks were made in Louth in the context of speaking about a former rugby player and distant cousin Rob Kearney. “He beat the hell out of the Black and Tans,” an admiring Biden recalled.

The more significant, and dangerous problem is that a decaying, eroding memory can become the perfect pretext of making appalling policy even as it is forgotten, a form of erasure as things are being done. Policies long pursued and understood can be given the heave-ho. Biden’s belligerence over the Taiwan question, and whether a war over the province with China would be worthwhile, is a case in point.

Biden’s opponent does not, oddly enough, have that problem. Donald Trump, even at 77-years of age, has a habit of transmuting inability to faux talent. One never knows whether his confusions are intentional in their malice or genuine acts of indifference or imbecility. (He very intentionally forgot the existence of WikiLeaks after the 2016 election, despite lauding the organisation’s press achievements prior.) More recently, competing Republican contender Nikki Haley got switched with Democrat veteran Nancy Pelosi. Petulant, hysterical, and stubbornly adolescent, he has a form of counterfeit youth on his side, the child in rompers who always screams even after downing the milk. When he errs, he is not only forgiven but given candied approval by his understanding supporters.

What matters now is the sense that the errors and lapses have arisen because of Biden’s age, the causal attribution to worn memory that renders the ruling magistrate enfeebled and vulnerable to overthrow. The campaign trail till November 2024 will be long and vicious, and Biden’s team may well have to reprise their role as quarantine specialists for their leader. In the meantime, best consult the RAND Corporation study about the risks posed by dementia afflicting the US imperium’s aged security and intelligence community. It promises to only get worse. 

At the risk of arousing my natural bias toward the truth, I have of late taken to reading Sky News. I have done so during the events surrounding Labor’s decision to change the settings for the stage three tax changes.

In doing so, I found a collection of half-truths, lies by omission and misrepresentation. I had to ask myself if we have reached the point in politics where truth is something that politicians have persuaded us to believe, “like alternative facts” rather than truth based on factual evidence, argument, and assertions. 

I am convinced Peter Dutton and others of his ilk, including his supporters in the media, believe that the effect of lying diminishes over time, and they forget that they leave behind a residue of broken trust.

Take this piece by Caroline Di Russo, Sky News, 3 February 2024. At the foot of her piece, she runs out of words to condemn Labor for breaking a promise. She concludes:  

“… Labor has opted for its tried and tested “class warfare” approach to politics.

The only change is a studious avoidance of the phrase “big end of town”, presumably because that didn’t work out so well for them during the 2019 campaign.

The politics of envy is the same though; it’s just a quieter version.

And I doubt we have seen the last of it.

During the Prime Minister’s National Press Club speech last week he refused to rule out changes to negative gearing.

Either it’s already on the cards, or the Prime Minister knew no one would believe him if he denied it so he just didn’t bother. Meanwhile, Treasurer Chalmers has since tried to reject such changes are on the cards.

Labor need to find more avenues to tax because they refuse to cut government spending – the true source of our domestic inflation.

Despite promising to go through the budget “line by line” to reduce government spending, Labor’s last budget included $185 billion in new spending commitments.

So instead of cutting spending to curb inflation, Labor will redistribute from the “top end of town” to pretend it is providing relief for lower- and middle-income earners.

The issue for voters is this: it’s not what Labor is giving with one hand today, it’s what they will take with the other tomorrow.”

Every time Labor tries to bring some counterbalance of fairness over Australian economics, the conservative response is always to shout at the top of their lungs, “class warfare”. When it is so evident that the wealthy and privileged enjoy wealth concessions way over that of the average citizen, why on earth do the conservatives not just admit it?

The country would be better off if politicians did change their minds when categorically demanded for the common good.

Why not just admit that the revised tax cuts are popular with up to 66% of the population and back them?

In my piece Money Money Money. It’s a Rich Man World I quoted research by the Australian Institute that is but one truth of how well the rich are looked after.

Last year, before legislation to fix the problem, their research showed that: 

“… the cost to the federal budget of generous superannuation tax concessions was on par with the cost of the entire aged pension and more significant than the total cost of the NDIS as a whole in 2022-2023.”

My piece goes on to explain in detail just how advantaged the wealthy and privileged really are, so it’s a bit rich for Caroline Di Russo to cry “class warfare” every time Labor tries to make society a little fairer. But then it was that British lady with lousy hair who said, “There is no such thing as society, only individuals making their way.”

“Class warfare” is a terrible and disgusting term, and if anyone is carrying it out, it is the conservatives. They are doing all the complaining.

Labor need to find more avenues to tax because they refuse to cut government spending – the true source of our domestic inflation.

This statement by Caroline Di Russo is either an outright lie or a misrepresentation of the facts. One only has to do a search asking if Labor has made an effort to wind back Government spending, and you will find ample evidence that they have.

Shane Wright in the Sydney Morning Herald also noted:  

“Almost $10 billion in federal spending will be either cut or pumped into other priorities in this week’s budget update as all levels of government come under pressure to reduce expenditure and ease inflation.”

And in another article for the same paper acknowledged that:

“In the space of 18 months, Treasurer Jim Chalmers has found the best part of $100 billion down the back of the budget lounge.” 

Even way back in October 2022 it looked as though some in the Murdoch media were enthusiastic about Labor’s budget:

“Labor to slash $21 billion of government spending after audit of departments.”

And Ellen Ransey reported in the Great Southern Herald that Jim Chalmers and Katy Gallaher were to reveal $17.8 in savings in the 2023 budget.

There are other examples, but these make my point.

Returning to Caroline Di Russo’s article, her assertion that there were increases in spending is correct, but they were investments designed to start productivity and drive growth. Therefore, there is a return on investment. There are deficits, but they are designed to decline in dollar terms as a percentage of the economy yearly.

To assert as she has done that cutting government spending is the cause of high inflation is absurd. It is a far more significant problem and more complex than her analysis.

There are few surprises regarding the final episode of Nemesis, the three-part account on how the Australian Liberal Party, in partnership with the dozy Nationals, psychotically and convulsively disembowelled themselves from the time Tony Abbott won office in 2013. Over the muddy gore and violence concluding the tenures of Abbott and Malcolm Turnbull, one plotter rose, knife bloodied and brimming with confidence: Scott Morrison. As always, he claims to have done so without a trace. That, dear readers, is the way of all advertising men.

The inconspicuous rise of Morrison heralded a bankrupt political culture, one of smeary gloss, smug grabs on complex issues, the insufferable slogan, the intelligence shaving brochure, the simplifying statement about worlds complex and abstract. No political environment can, nor should ever eschew the simple message, but Morrisons’s minute, unimaginative cosmos – that of the advertising man with his swill bucket sloshing away – had little to merit it.

With such a stunted Weltanschauung, Morrison’s misdeeds proved vast in spread and stench, the result of what former cabinet minister and creep-in-chief Christopher Pyne understatedly called a “lack of humility”. The makers of Nemesis could only dip their feet in the waters of his blighted stewardship. It would have taken several immersions alone to cover the despoiling of public life marked by stacking the Fair Work Commission and Administrative Appeals Tribunal with appointments friendly to the Coalition or the so-called “rorts” affairs, of which there were many cloacal instances of corruption.

While the library of Australian politics is shelf-heavy with misused funds to advance the fortunes of the party in government, the Morrison government proved exemplary. In the lead-up to the 2019 election, Nationals Senator Bridget McKenzie’s office was the happy recipient of $100 million worth of community sport infrastructure grants. Their destination was exclusively towards marginal seats, best typified by the mock presentation by Georgina Downer to the South Australian Yankalilla bowling club of a $127,373 grant. The novelty cheque from the Liberal candidate for Mayo was scorned by sitting member and independent Rebekha Sharkie at the time as unrivalled in its crassness and desperation.

Much the same story was repeated in the so-called “car parks rorts” affair, which saw hundreds of millions of dollars directed towards 47 car parks, largely located in the top 20 marginal seats selected by staffers working for the then infrastructure minister, Alan Tudge. The decision making by the staffers left the Department of Infrastructure a mere spectator to policy.

By 2022, Morrison’s crooked form on the issue of grants was complete and immortal. The Australian National Audit Office, when examining the Building Better Regions Fund (BBRF), found that “65 per cent of IP [infrastructure project] stream applications approved for funding were not those assessed as being the most meritorious in the assessment process.”

Other matters covered in the series finale continue to look baffling and uncomfortable. Authoritarian paranoia made its ugly appearance in Morrison’s decision to appoint himself, unbeknownst to his fellow ministers, to the departments of health, finance, treasury, home affairs and resources during the COVID-19 crisis. Despite the ravages of the pandemic and the risks of debility to his cabinet, there was no reason for doing so.

Excruciating clumsiness stood out with his handling of sexual assault allegations made by Liberal staffer Brittany Higgins (“Jenny [Morrison’s wife] and I spoke last night and she said to me, you have to think about this as a father”) while his abominable treatment of Christine Holgate, which resulted in the removal of Australia Post’s most successful CEO for approving Cartier watches for select staff, suggested what came to known as the government’s “woman problem”. The Nationals leader, David Littleproud, could only draw the obvious conclusion: “[W]omen had lost faith in us because we didn’t handle those situations well. That was the real beginning, where Australians stopped listening, but particularly women stopped listening.”

Gross indifference over his clandestine family trip to Hawaii as Australia scorched and smouldered before furious bush fires, one which he hoped the then-Nationals leader Michael McCormack could keep mum about, suggested Morrison’s lack of maturity. “It looked as if there had been lies told to the [press] gallery,” Liberal Senator Andrew Bragg admitted. Liberal MP Russell Broadbent preferred to be “gobsmacked” about the whole affair.

On the issue of the AUKUS security pact between the US, UK and Australia, Morrison nails his colours firmly to the mast as a dangerously deluded pioneer. It was he, and only he, that suggested the submarine agreement with France’s Naval Group for twelve diesel-powered attack submarines be scratched in favour of a nuclear-propulsion option.

Given the incurably mendacious nature of the man, claims to having a monopoly on AUKUS must be regarded with caution. For one thing, it has since come to light that the Australian businessman Anthony Pratt already had former US President Donald Trump’s ear on the subject of nuclear-powered submarines when they met at the Mar-a-Lago club in April 2021. Pratt then allegedly shared the details of the discussion with three former Australian prime ministers, 10 Australian officials, 11 of Pratt’s employees and six journalists. The announcement of AUKUS only took place on September 15, 2021, suggesting a filtering of ideas through the Australian-US security apparatus. Trump may have left office by then, but the lingering interests of the US military industrial complex had not.

Morrison’s unspeakable treatment of the French president, Emmanuel Macron, proved diabolically amateurish and spiteful. To have dinner with the head of state of another country even as plans to terminate an agreement worth A$90 billion is underfoot, suggests some form of arrested mental development. “You don’t cancel a $90 billion contract and the other party is happy,” he merely shrugged. In any case, he did not want to see Macron deploy “the entire French diplomatic corps and [kill] the deal.” This was, in his mind, “the best” of decisions, “one that others had never sought to successfully undertake.”

If the best decision of an administration involves the renting of a country’s autonomy, the surrendering of land and facilities to be used by a nuclear-armed, clumsy goliath, the conversion of an entire state to the status of a garrisoned, forward defence base to police rivals, including a power with whom you have no historical animosity with, one is coming very close to confusing patriotic innovation and self-interest with treason.

Meme from The Shovel

There go my people. I must follow them, for I am their leader * (Image from mbbshrabdullah.medium.com)

This article was originally published on Grumpy Geezer.

Now that Australians have, depending on where they live, gotten through fires and floods or too many days at the cricket drinking excessively, some will turn their attention to what’s happening over the dunes in the world around them.

It may be too early to discuss such an issue like the next election, but it is worth considering now that Labor has changed its mind on the stage three tax cuts.

Will the Prime Minister go for an early election later this year or wait until 2025?

The earliest date for a regular election is August 3, 2024. The latest it can be held is 27 September 2025. The stakes are high between a man who has broken a promise and another who is the most distrusted politician in the country.

No matter when Albanese chooses to go, it will be another election vital for the country’s future. I say “vital” because the country needs change. Changes that will make for a better society, a fairer one. Fundamental, meaningful changes. First, cab off the rank has to be tax reform, and then it has to be continuous reform. They have started, and Labor is the only party that can bring about the changes, but it needs three terms.

Peter Dutton has already demanded that the Prime Minister call one over Labor’s tax revisions, but that won’t happen.

The Labor Party has skillfully executed a political tactic known as a reverse wedge on the Opposition. This strategy has forced Dutton to agree with the government’s proposed changes, which are aimed at promoting equity. Despite being reluctant, Dutton had no other option but to give in. However, it remains to be seen whether he realises that most Australians aspire for a fairer distribution of resources and opportunities.

Opposing a tax break for every Australian taxpayer while simultaneously demanding that the government take steps to alleviate the burden of living expenses was not only embarrassing but also appeared contradictory. On the other hand, supporting the proposed changes would be seen as hypocritical.

Paul Bongiorno wrote that:

“The redesign of the stage-three tax cuts is a watershed moment in the conversation the nation needs to have over expanding the revenue base to pay for the sorts of things that a modern, healthy, educated, secure and caring nation demands.”

According to research by the Australia Institute, nearly three in five voters across all demographics supported the changes.

Richard Dennis, at the Press Club on Wednesday, 31 January, said that the Albanese government’s decision to change the tax cut was the most honest thing he had seen by an Australian politician for a decade.

So far, in its first term, any agenda Labor may have had toward significant changes to our democracy has been thwarted by a worldwide economic downturn over which they have had little or no control. It has spent much of its first term picking up the mess the conservatives left behind, as duly noted by the Treasurer, Jim Chalmers:

“Upon taking office, the Albanese Labor government inherited not only $1 trillion of coalition debt but also a massive skills deficit. This situation is so dire that according to the OECD Australia is experiencing the second-most severe labour shortage in the developed world.”

The latest inflation figures of 4.1% in the December quarter suggest we have turned the corner and will begin to see interest rates come down this year.

The conservatives will, of course, be subject to the same economic advantages or disadvantages that exist whenever the Prime Minister decides to go to the people. However, a fair assessment looking forward is that inflation will be under control and the economy will be in better shape. 

The average person may have a question in mind that is related to the Opposition, its leadership, and its policies for the Australian people. Peter Dutton, the current leader, is not a trusted figure for many, and some may see him as a replica of the former Prime Minister, Tony Abbott. According to some, the Opposition may only have little to offer except for criticism and a lack of constructive policies.

They could hardly, as they had proclaimed in many elections, claim that they are the best managers of money when they left the country a trillion dollars in debt.

Their persistent denial of a climate and energy problem over nearly a decade has also left them in a tough spot. They are now tasked with devising policies that effectively address both issues despite their earlier reluctance to acknowledge the problem. For almost ten years, they refused to admit that there was a problem with our climate and energy. Consequently, they now find it extremely challenging to formulate policies that address both issues effectively.

And all the spooky ultra-right-wing deniers are still there, as are their media supporters.

Again, on economics. It will be challenging putting forward a position of superiority on economics when your leader needs to learn more about the subject.

And it would be tough to say you had an anti-corruption policy when your own party practiced it.

When debating social services, a Royal Commission has found the LNP comprehensibly at fault over Robodebt. It will feature in the campaign. Many protagonists stand for re-election, and others will face a higher court of opinion. Added to the who you trust question is one of greater importance: why are you there?

If you are watching the ABC programme Nemesis, you would have noted that Tony Abbott, Julie Bishop, Mathias Corman, and Peter Dutton all refused to participate. I would suggest at the risk of tarnishing their images any further. If so, you will have concluded, as l did, that the Coalition spent more time on leadership infighting than actual governance. This shone through despite their inability to see that what they were doing was beyond contempt. 

Labor can also easily argue away the tax breaks as being not a broken promise but a more equitable share of the pie. The promise is kept, but the configuration is altered.

No doubt, given their expertise in the subject, the conservatives will throw in a scare or two. Still, they could be hit to the boundary without an accompanying truth.

Labor has, to a large degree, restored our trade relationship with China, and other relationships have been repaired. Needless to say, Foreign Affairs is a no-go zone for the LNP unless they intend to shirtfront a few leaders.

Dutton can hardly campaign on his party’s record when in office. In fact, it would be difficult for him to put forward anything that wasn’t touched by corruption.

There is nothing wrong with the narrative of being an innovative country with a creative economy. In fact, it should be a worthwhile pursuit. So Dutton may devise some promise he knows he will never be obliged to keep. By that I mean he may run dead.

There are three problems, though. Firstly, all innovation is generated by education. If Dutton takes the private school’s route, he will be accused of prioritising Christian and private schools. Inevitably, Labor will accuse him of religious preferentialism and class nepotism. Innovation born of educational privilege is a hard sell.

Malcolm Turnbull even once warned:

“I suspect no federal government would retreat from funding and continuing to support the non-government school sector because there would be a concern that they would not get a fair go from state governments who obviously would have a competing interest with their schools.”

Strangely, conservatives have never realised that kids from low socioeconomic backgrounds are our most untapped source of potential growth. They are the most undervalued resource.

Times were supposedly better in 2022. That is, if you were a lawmaker in the Australian state of Victoria, a busy Israeli arms manufacturer, or cash counting corporate middleman keen to make a stash along the way between the two. That view is premised on the notion that what happened on October 7, 2023 in Israel was stunningly remarkable, a historical blot dripped and dribbled from nothingness, leaving the Jewish state vengeful and yearning to avenge 1200 deaths and the taking of 240 hostages. All things prior were dandy and uncontroversial. 

Last month, word got out that the Victorian government had inked a memorandum of understanding (MoU) with the Israeli Defence Ministry in December 2022. “As Australia’s advanced manufacturing capital, we are always exploring economic and trade opportunities for our state – especially those that create local jobs,” a government spokesperson stated in January. It’s just business.

No one half observant to this should have been surprised, though no evidence of the MoU, in form or substance, exists on Victorian government websites. (It is, however, listed on the Australian government’s Foreign Arrangements Scheme register.) For one thing, Israel’s Ministry of Defense had happily trumpeted it, stating that its International Defense Cooperation Directorate (SIBAT) and the Victorian statement government had “signed an industrial defense cooperation statement” that December. Those present at the signing ceremony were retired General Yair Kulas, who heads SIBAT and Penelope McKay, acting secretary for Victoria’s Department of Jobs, Precincts, and Regions.

That an MoU should grow from this was a logical outcome, a feature of the State’s distinctly free approach to entering into agreements with foreign entities. In April 2021, the previous Morrison government terminated four agreements made by the Victorian government with Iran, Syria and China. The agreements with Iran and Syria, signed in November 2004 and March 1999 respectively, were intended as educational, scientific and training ventures. The two agreements with China came in the form of an MoU and framework agreement with the National Development and Reform Commission of the PRC, both part of Beijing’s Belt and Road Initiative (BRI).  

The Israeli arms industry has taken something of a shine to Victoria. One of its most aggressive, enterprising representatives has been Elbit Systems, Israel’s prolific drone manufacturing company. Through Elbit Systems of Australia (ELSA), it established a Centre of Excellence in Human-Machine Teaming and Artificial Intelligence in Port Melbourne after announcing its plans to do so in February 2021. 

One of its main co-sponsors is the state government’s Invest Victoria branch. The body is tasked with, in the tortured words of the government, “leading new entrant Foreign Direct Investment and investment opportunities of significance as well as enhancing the business investment environment, developing and providing whole-of-government levers and strengthening the governance of investment attraction activities.” RMIT University’s Centre for Industrial AI Research and Innovation also did its bit alongside the state government in furnishing support. 

The two-year partnership with ELSA’s Centre of Excellence had rosy, arcadian goals. The company’s then managing director and retired Major General Paul McLachlan wanted to impress his audience with glossily innocent reasons behind developing drone technology, which entailed counting any “number of people in designated evacuation zones, then to co-ordinate and communicate the most efficient evacuation routes to everyone in the zone, as well as monitoring the area to ensure that everyone has been accounted for.” 

McLachlan, in focusing on “the complex problems that emergency management organisations face during natural disasters” skipped around the nastily obvious fact that the technology’s antecedents have been lethal in nature. They had been used to account for the killing and monitoring of Palestinians in Gaza, with its star performer being Elbit’s Hermes drone. A grisly fact from the summer months of July 2014, when the IDF was making much use of Elbit’s murderous products in Gaza, company profits increased by 6.1%.

This was not a record that worried the director of the Australian Strategic Policy Institute’s defence, strategy and national security program, Michael Shoebridge. As he told the ABC, the MoU “would have been entirely uncontroversial before the Israel-Hamas war. But now, of course, there’s a live domestic debate about the war, and … most people are concerned about civilian casualties.”

It is exactly the slipshod reasoning that gives the think-tankers a bad name.  It means that Israel’s predatory policies towards Palestinians since 1948 can be dismissed as peripheral and inconsequential to the current bloodbath. The racial-administrative policies of the Jewish state in terms of controlling and dispossessing Palestinians in the West Bank and the trampling, sealing and suffocating of Gaza, can be put down to footnotes of varying, uncontroversial relevance.

The Victorian Greens disagree. On February 7, the party released a statement promising to introduce a motion calling on the Victorian government “to end its secretive relationship with the Israeli Ministry of Defence.” They also demanded the government to “sever any ties with companies arming Israel’s Defence Force, which has killed 27,500 Palestinians in less than four months.”

Given the federal government’s brusque termination of previous agreements entered into by Victoria with purportedly undesirable entities, the Albanese government has a useful precedent. With legal proceedings underway in the International Court of Justice in The Hague seeking to determine whether genocide is taking place in Gaza, along with an interim order warning Israel to abide by the UN Genocide Convention, a sound justification has presented itself. Complicity with genocide – actual, potential or as yet unassessed by a court – can hardly be in Canberra’s interest. Over to you, Prime Minister Anthony Albanese.

By Denis Bright  

Jessica van Vonderen’s interview with Premier Miles on 2 February 2024 was a launch pad for a more in-depth analysis of Queensland politics. Good critical news reporting as provided by ABC News introduces those structures of power and influence. From timber panelled offices at Parliament House and 1 William Street, cabinet ministers and trusted advisers steer reactions to topical incidents on our behalf.

As mentioned by ABC news reader Lexy Hamilton-Smith prior to Jessica van Vonderen’s interview with Premier Miles, the Queensland Labor Government is striving to provide cost-of-living relief to Queensland households. The Premier is also under pressure from reactions to climate change, crime and the delivery of health services and other major infrastructure commitments.

Milestones on the way forward are the local government elections across Queensland on 16 March 2024 with by-elections in Ipswich West and Inala on the same date. A good result in the Brisbane City Council election and local government elections in adjacent councils of Moreton Bay, Redcliffe, Redlands and Logan will provide a morale booster for either side of politics. The political stakes are particularly high in the weeks ahead.

Twelve years ago, Premier Can Do Campbell won the Queensland election for the LNP on an epic landslide to Queensland Conservatives with a 13.7 percent swing against Labor after preferences. There was a reduction of 15.6 percent in Labor’s primary vote with the loss of forty-four of Labor’s fifty-one state seats under challenge from the 2010 state election result.

Despite the eminent qualifications of the Treasurer and Financial Minister in the Bligh Government, ministerial advisers had panicked over conservative reactions to the budget deficits incurred during the GFC. Its impact had global proportions, but eyewitness news services focused on local debt issues. These concerns propelled both Premier Campbell Newman and Prime Minister Tony Abbott into Office.

Premier Miles noted that commitment to a 75 percent reduction in carbon emissions by 2035 over prevailing emission levels in 2005 is in the best traditions of sustainable economic management and commitment to employment levels in new industries associated with alternative energy, advancement of hydrogen technology and the generation of lower cost electricity. There are commitments to provide cost-of-living relief for every household in Queensland during 2024 with particular emphasis on more disadvantaged households.

Premier Miles also promised a commitment to Tough on Crime Strategies. Such issues will be emphasized by the LNP in the Ipswich West by-election.

Official police data for the Ipswich Police District shows that crime rates as opposed to numbers of crimes have not increased so dramatically since 2000. Terrible incidents are still embedded in this data. However, the trendlines are not as alarming as claimed by the Murdoch Press, Sky News or other sensational media outlets.

There are variations in the rates of criminal offenses.

The Queensland Labor Government is striving for the right balance between responsible Tough on Crime Strategies and generation of local jobs, TAFE training programmes and new infrastructure options.

Communities such as the partially gentrified suburb of West End in Brisbane benefit when the corporate sector takes up Transport Oriented Development (TOD) initiatives at places like Montague Markets in West End, Brisbane are successful private sector initiatives:

Spacious shopping precincts with high profile retail anchors co-exist with professional health services and layers of medium rise housing units.

With significant support from government or its investment agency in the Queensland Investment Corporation (QIC) could transform Top of Town in Ipswich to make survival easier for small business outlets. Despite the very best initiatives by small entrepreneurs and family businesses, more support from government and the corporate sector should be able to expand business opportunities.

Making Heritage City Great Again

Fringe benefits from these co-investment initiatives by government and the corporate sector could assist in delivering a new transport terminal for buses and trains to Top of Town, immediate action on the Springfield-Ipswich Transport Corridor, new inner-city social housing for Ipswich and initiatives in flood control measures and landscaping in the vicinity of Timothy Molony Oval closer to the Bremer River. The combined leadership talents of a more progressive Ipswich City Council and the possible arrival of Wendy Bourne as Labor member for Ipswich West with the former Labor member Jim Madden on the Ipswich Council as a representative for Division Four would ensure that those two levels of government are reading from a similar page-book.

Perusal of Treasurer Jim Chalmer’s Monthly Essay (February 2023) also endorses the commitment to New Keynesianism with all the resources available to the federal Labor Government.

In a time of serial disruption – to our economy, our society and our environment – the treasurer argues for the place of values and optimism in how we rethink capitalism:

In late October, just before the Albanese government’s first budget, a journalist I have known for two decades messaged me a quote from one of the earliest Greek philosophers, Heraclitus: “No man ever steps in the same river twice. For it’s not the same river, and he’s not the same man.”

The “Washington Consensus” became shorthand to describe recommendations and orthodoxies for developing countries urged by the International Monetary Fund and World Bank – a reference to each institution’s proximity to the other in Washington, DC. Over time it became a caricature for ever more simplistic and uniform policy prescriptions for “more market, not less.” This school of thought assumed that markets would typically self-correct before disaster struck.

It’s clear now that the problem wasn’t so much more markets as poorly designed ones. Carefully constructed markets are a positive and powerful tool. As the influential economist Mariana Mazzucato has explored in her work, markets built in partnership through the efforts of business, labour and government are still the best mechanism we have to efficiently and effectively direct resources. But these considered and efficient markets were not what the old model delivered. And while the 2008 crisis finally exposed the illegitimacy of this approach, no fresh consensus has yet taken its place.

With the support offered by three levels of Labor administration, it is now time for Steven Miles to take the responsible policy plunge to save the State Labor Government from its Underdog Status as identified by the Premier himself in his epic interview with Jessica van Vonderen.

Advice from Brutus in Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar