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The ABC’s Colonel Blimp

The position of a state broadcaster, one funded directly by taxpayers from a particular country, places it in a delicate position. The risk of alignment with the views of the day, as dictated by one class over another; the danger that one political position will somehow find more air than another, is ever present. The pursuit of objectivity can itself become a distorting dogma.

Like its counterpart in the United Kingdom, the Australian Broadcasting Corporation can count itself lucky to be given a place of such dominance in the media market. None of that gimmickry to boost subscriber numbers. No need for annual, or half-yearly fund drives.

Why, then, did the ABC chairman, Kim Williams, do it? And by doing it, this involved attacking US-based podcaster Joe Rogan in an address to the National Press Club in Canberra, a foolish, bumbling excursion into the realms of broadcasting and podcasting the ABC might do well to learn from.

In the question session, when asked about the influence of Rogan (“the world’s most influential podcaster”, sighs the ABC journalist), Williams shows little interest in analysis. Rather than understanding the scope of his appeal, one that drew Donald Trump to the microphone in a meandering conversational epic of waffle and disclosure lasting three hours,he “personally” found “it deeply repulsive, and to think that someone has such remarkable power in the United States is something that I look at in disbelief.” He further felt a sense of “dismay that this can be a source of public entertainment when it’s really treating the public as plunder for purposes that are really quite malevolent.”

Williams makes a point of juxtaposing the weak, impressionable consumer of news – one who will evidently be set straight by the likes of his network – and those of Rogan and his tribe of entrepreneurial podcasting fantasists who “prey on all the elements that contribute to uncertainty in society,” suggesting that “conspiracy outcomes” are merely “a normal part of social narrative.”

It is worth noting here that Williams is a former chief executive of an organisation that loved (and still loves) preying on anxieties, testing the waters of fear, and pushing absurdly demagogic narratives in boosting readership and subscriptions. That most unscrupulous outfit is a certain News Corp, its imperishable tycoon Rupert Murdoch still clinging to the pulpit with savage commitment.

Once Williams crossed the commercial river to become ABC chair, he had something of a peace-loving conversion, all part of a festival of inclusivity that has proven tedious and meretricious. The public broadcaster, he said in June this year, should become “national campfire” to enable a greater understanding of Australia’s diverse communities.

It did not take long for the Williams show of snark to make its way to Rogan Land and his defenders, notably Elon Musk, who spent time with Rogan in the lead-up to November’s US presidential election spruiking the credentials of Trump. Showing how Williams had exposed his flank, and that of the organisation he leads, the tech oligarch, relevantly the director of X Corp (formerly Twitter), was bound to say something given his ongoing skirmishes withAustralian regulators and lawmakers in their efforts to regulate access to social media.

From such infantilising bureaucrats as eSafety Commissioner Julie Inman Grant to the spluttering Williams who bemoans the “Joe Rogan effect”, Musk is being given, rather remarkably, a whitewash of respectability. Their efforts to protect Australians from any prospect of being offended, mentally corrupted, unduly influenced and one might even say being excited, is of such an order as to beggar belief. With little imagination, Musk retorted with boring predictability: “From the head of Australian government-funded media, their Pravda.”

Williams remains truly dumbfounded by this. “You make a comment in response to a legitimate question from a journalist, you answer it concisely and give an honest answer in terms of what your own perception of what [Rogan] is and suddenly I get this huge pile-on from people in the most aggressive way.” Accusations include having “a warped outlook on the world”, being “an embarrassment” and showing signs of being “unhinged”. Ignorance would be the better distillation here.

There is something to be said about Williams being hermetic to media forms that have prevented him from getting to the national campfire he championed. He speaks of communities and users as vague constructions rather than accessible groups. He also ignores, for instance, that Rogan was open to allowing Trump’s opponent, the Democrat contender, Kamala Harris, to come onto his program conducted in his Texas podcast studio during the campaign. This offer was eventually withdrawn given the conditions Harris, ever terrified by unscripted formats and lengthy interviews, demanded Rogan follow. The strategists and handlers had to have their say, and for their role and for Harris’s caution, she paid a price.

For a man with a News Corp pedigree and one no doubt familiar with the Murdoch Empire’s creepy techniques of influence and seduction exercised over the electorates and political processes of other countries – the United States, the UK and Australia immediately come to mindWilliams has shown himself the media iteration of a bamboozled, charmless Colonel Blimp.

Williams might best focus on the problems at his own broadcaster, the organisation the Australians call Auntie. It boasts, constantly, that it is the place where “news” can be found, but more importantly, “news you can trust”. But the current iteration of news remains bland, benign and pitifully regulated. It is clear what the talking points are when it comes to reporting on such areas of the world as the Middle East. Killings by the Israeli Defence Forces, even if they do involve the liquidation of whole buildings and villagers, are never massacres but measures of overzealous self-defence. Hamas and Hezbollah, being Israel’s adversaries, are always prefaced as indulgent terrorists. The list goes on, and, it would seem, the problems Williams is facing.

 

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The rise and rise of the right

I hate it when this happens: stroll into a bookshop and see a book that looks good, read the cover notes and spend the money. Get home and start reading and the author is having a giant whinge, in this case how the invasion of refugees is killing Europe: “The Strange Death of Europe” by Douglas Murray.

His other books are also bit of a whinge, whinging about the threats he sees the west facing, The War on the West and The Madness of Crowds: Race Gender and Identity.

In a sense, he is right, the changes we have seen in our lifetimes have been great, and in my view mostly positive, but he tends to cherry pick events and statistics, laying out a bleak future for Europe and the west in generalor should I say the superior white Christian world.

Since the 1950s there has been a constant flow of migrants around the world. People moving from one country to another, moving from war torn Europe to the relative safety of the new world, Canada, USA, Argentina, South Africa, Australia and New Zealand. At the same time displaced Jews were seeking safety and security in the newly created Israel.

The mass migration left many jobs unable to be filled and so while Europeans were busy leaving Europe, people from the Middle East were encouraged to fill the labour voids in the most basic of service industries. People came, initially thought to just fill the jobs the remaining Europeans thought beneath them, expecting that in time, those guest workerswould go back home, but they didnt. They stayed, making comfortable lives in their adopted lands, bringing with them their cultures, languages, and religion. Subsequent generations benefitted from the educational opportunities on offer and the growing economies to become fixtures in their new homelands.

Political stability and growing economies throughout Europe, North America, Australia and New Zealand made each of those regions attractive to people in less stable environments. Conflict and political unrest in Africa and the Middle East saw further waves of migration as people sought to escape from the various threats of civil wars, famine, religious conflicts and political and economic uncertainties.

The collapse of empires added to the instability and in particularly in Britain and France, but also the Netherlands and other European colonial powers, citizens from former colonies arrived, claiming the rights of citizenship as permanent settlers, again, initially filling roles which were beneath the dignity of the colonial masters to fill, collecting fares on public transport, collecting garbage, the undesirable jobs, but bringing up families, educating children to become future leaders in commerce, industry and politics.

During the post war period an important political development was the unification of Europe, firstly under the Treaty of Rome with six countries working together but gradually expanding to include 27 countries today, using a common currency and allowing free movement between those countries, including the right to work and study, and enabling the free movement of goods and services between the member nations, effectively a unified economic bloc. To a large extent, the divisions of national identity which had caused so much division in the past, regional wars and two world wars have been minimised, perhaps relegated to the sporting arenas as a unified Europe is a haven of international peace.

With that peace came social changes which broke down barriers, religion become a secondary consideration, national identity, womens rights, gay rights, a more accepting, liberal culture flourished. But as the populations grew, it was the new immigrants who grew the fastest, birthrates of Europeans fell to below replacement levels but the newcomers – mainly Muslims – saw their populations grow, and instead of becoming liberal like the Europeans, held fast to their religion as migrants have done where ever they have migrated to, forming communities around cultural symbols they bring with them: language, religion, culture, morality. A comfort zone for them but seen as a threat by others.

Tensions in the Middle East, conflicts between the Islamic sects and power struggles, the fall of the Shahs regime in Iran, ongoing strife between Israel and Palestine, civil wars in Lebanon and Syria and numerous conflicts throughout Africa has seen a continuing flow of refugees head toward Europe as the first destination. Currently the UN estimates there are over 120 million people, either refugees or stateless people. Many seek refuge in Europe, and Europe has been a welcoming destination for a number of years. But this is fuelling discontent.

Angela Merkels immigration policy and humanitarian approach to refugees and asylum seekers has been a factor in the rise of the far-right; Alternative fur Deutschland party in Germany. Recent elections in The Netherlands and France have seen nationalist, right-wing parties increase their vote. Hungary, under the Prime Minister Viktor Orban has sealed the borders, not allowing the flow of refugees access to Hungary, not even as a transit route to other, more welcoming European nations.

Britain, under the recently ousted Tory government saw a retreat from the European Union and a harsh anti-immigrant approach as refugees kept crossing the English Channel from France. Following the Australian policy of off-shore detention, there was the attempt to send those seeking refuge to Rwanda.

The recent election in the US had immigration and unwanted foreigners front and centre as there has been a constant stream of illegal immigrants crossing from South and Central America and from strife ridden island nations in the Caribbean. The flow of people seeking a better lifeseems to never end. What is it that makes Europe and the USA (and for that matter, Australia) such sought after destinations for the stateless and the refugees, for poor people looking for employment and a living wage?

What is wrong with the rest of the world? Why are other regions not seen as worthy destinations for those seeking refuge or economic opportunity?

What is wrong with wealthy Middle Eastern states; Iran, Saudi, Qatar, UAE and so forth. Each has burgeoning economies based on the wealth generated by liquid gold, oil. Each imports labour to do the hard work of construction as well as in the service industries, employing guest workers from Pakistan, the Philippines and other impoverished countries.

Some of the problems being faced in Europe which would not, should not be an issue in the Middle Eastern nations is religion since all nations listed are Muslim. And their skin colour is brown cultural values are similar. (Sorry if that is a bit racist, but colour of skin, religion and cultural differences are really the issues here.)

And they are the constants in the books by Douglas Murray. He does not like change, he wants to live in a perfect world where all are like him. The changes which have given rights to other people, different people are dangerous, they upset the sensibilities of good white people who know who they are because they have the bits which define them as man or woman, and they know their special place in relation to their religion, they are literate, they are educated and know their place in the world.

He asks not why people seek to travel from their homelands, whether it is because of famine, poverty, climate change, persecution, civil wars or religious bigotry, but looks only at them being where they should not be, behaving as they should not behave, believing what they should not believe. They are different and do not belong.

And he has a broad following, not that his followers know who they are following, but the language of hate, of division, of fear marks the vitriol of so many politicians on the right, and those who feel threatened by difference can be as far removed from the problem they see as the woman who was afraid of a trans person using the womens toilet when she admitted she knew no trans person, but was responding to social media commentary, or the young man who hated gays, but when asked about racism, understood what hatred was since he is Maori, a minority in Australia.

Or witness the ugly debate in the Senate on Wednesday, Pauline Hanson, Fatima Payman and Lidia Thorpe in verbal conflict, all to do with race and religion, with people being different. Each is an Australian citizen, each has a position as Senator, each representing their constituents.

But the discrimination has its seeds in colonisation, just as the immigration dilemmas in Europe and America, were it not for colonisation, neither Pauline Hanson or Fatima Payman would be here in Australia.

I visited the holiday destination Rottnest Island recently and was reminded of colonisation and the treatment of difference since the island was used as a prison for Aboriginals in the early days of settlement. A story was told of an An Aboriginal man having his spear in the woomera, ready to kill a kangaroo when a rifle shot sounded and the kangaroo was claimed by the white settler who was grazing sheep on that land. Rather than let his mob go hungry, the aboriginal killed a sheep which was nearby. He was arrested, charged with theft and sent to Rottnest to serve out his sentence.

I fear that with the upcoming election, difference will play a significant part. Hatred of difference, hatred of illegal immigrants, hatred of First Nations people with a tough on crime strategy, criminalising poverty and race, hatred in one of the most ethnic and culturally diverse nations on earth.

Why?

 

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Angry America

By James Moore

When the video appears on TVs and computer screens, it will, initially, be shocking. Men in uniforms, wearing sidearms or guns drawn, will walk up and knock on the front doors of modest homes. An unanswered door will be battered down with a heavy ram. The people hiding inside will be dragged out to waiting vans, crying, children screaming for their parents. They will be loaded up and driven down their neighborhood’s street and taken to a fenced compound, likely to be called a deportation center or camp. Family members will probably be separated as they wait for mass transportation to the border, where they will be frog-walked back to a country many of them had never even experienced. Possibly, to complete the tableau, long trains with box cars will wait on sidings to take passengers to unknown destinations.

Assuming the new administration can pull off mass deportation, there will be varying types of raids. Cameras will be invited to watch as immigration agents sweep into meat packing plants and small manufacturing facilities and reduce to custody the entire workforce. Buses will be parked nearby and people, many with blood still dripping from their work aprons in an abattoir, will be herded aboard and driven off to unknown locations to await deportation. Their families will not know why they did not return from work that evening. Troops from the U.S. Army will patrol barbed wire fence lines of these internment camps spread across the American landscape, which will also serve, symbolically as graveyards of our “better angels.”

Whether the Trump administration is competent enough to even deport 500 immigrants is worth contemplating. The only endeavor he has not failed at in his life is getting low-information and low-intellect voters to believe his bullshit. According to the president-elect, he plans to invoke the 1798 Alien Enemies Act to authorize the deportation of immigrants. The last time the measure was used occurred during World War II when the land of the free rounded up 100,000 ethnic Japanese and placed them in internment camps. Two-thirds of the detained were American citizens. The law is supposed to be used only when this nation is involved in a declared war, but such technicalities are not likely to restrain Trump and the racist administrators of his xenophobic fantasies.

If Trump’s incompetence can overcome the deportation logistics, the consequences of losing lower-wage labor will almost certainly have a sweeping downward impact on the U.S. economy. Crops on the truck farms of California’s fertile Central Valley, which feed much of this country, will surely rot in the fields or never be planted. There is no rush of Americans demanding they be given jobs bending their backs to pull vegetables from the ground or picking and loading the sweet cantaloupes from the Pecos River Valley of West Texas. Jobs on farms and ranches across the country will go unfilled, prompting less production on family operations and force many to surrender to the spreading power of agribusiness corporations. Home construction, too, in a thriving economic climate will shrivel to almost nothing without Mexican labor, documented or illegal.

 

 

Anger appears to be more important to the American electorate than information. Trump was mad and that translated into voters who did not believe that inflation was under control, the country was adding jobs every month, wages were rising, and the U.S. economy was the “envy of the world.” Robust may not be an adequate word for how well the economy has performed under the Biden administration. Figures indicate the Gross Domestic Product (GDP) has risen 12.6 percent during the president’s tenure and that more than 44,000 applications per month were filed for new businesses, a figure without equal in the country’s history, and according to the White House, about 90 percent faster than applications prior to the pandemic. The African American and Hispanic voters who crossed over to vote for Republican distemper must have been oblivious to the fact that, under Mr. Biden, black ownership of companies doubled and Hispanic businesses rose 40 percent.

People were grousing about the cost of groceries, and, in some locations, the price of gasoline, but the economic engine of the nation was thrumming along and there was no apparent need to change political leadership, which may be precisely why the Democrats lost the presidential campaign. According to a new study by the University of Chicago, a healthy economy always accrues to the political benefit of Republican candidates, even when they are not incumbents. The Booth School of Business analysis appears to prove Trump won because the economy is thriving. I consider this more of an indictment of the failed historic messaging of Democrats than voter ignorance, though there was certainly no shortage of vacuous decision making in the voting booth. Americans are convinced, wrongly, that taxes are lower and more jobs are created when a Republican holds office, and obviously, are not sophisticated enough thinkers to link current economic success to the Democrat who has held the office the past four years. Republicans are in fact, as demonstrated by the chart below, bad for the economy, and Trump has been the worst.

 

The Booth School analyzed 89 years of data on elections and the economy and discovered that, regardless of the incumbent, a weak economy favors Democrats and a strong economy augurs to the benefit of Republicans. The study points to the two biggest economic crises of the past century, which are the Great Depression and the Great Recession. Democrat Franklin D. Roosevelt was elected to turn the economy around in 1932, and, in 2008, Americans chose Democrat Barack Obama to undo the crisis caused by Wall Street’s speculative practices. Voters picked John Kennedy in the midst of the 1960-61 recession, Jimmy Carter to fix a similar problem with the 1973-75 recession, and Bill Clinton when the economy got bumpy in 1990-91. The Booth School model effectively predicted Trump to win with a good economy in 2016 and Biden to be elected during the Covid-19 crisis, which was bad for more than just the economy. Predictably, then, Biden’s vibrant economy meant that Republican Trump would be restored to office.

The most disturbing revelation of these outcomes is the rationale used by voters; it is also a condemnation of messaging by Democrats and their inability to get out from under their brand image. The public believes Democrats are best to hold office in trying times because they will indulge in redistribution of resources and raise taxes to solve problems and provide social safety nets. Republicans get votes during strong economies because, as the authors of the study wrote, “voters are more willing to take risks and therefore more likely to elect Republicans, who favor lower taxes.” As facile as that sounds, it is true; Americans believe the myth that Republicans are better for jobs, economy, and taxes and that Democrats are big spenders and bigger taxers.

Was there not enough reason, though, to break the model with Trump? Had he not tried to overthrow an election? Was he not convicted of 34 felonies and adjudicated to be a rapist? Had he not bragged about groping women against their will? Did he not mock a disabled journalist during a televised speech? Had he not told the country that Covid would go away “in the warmer weather,” a falsehood that was the partial cause of 1.1 million dead Americans? Voting for him was, I suppose, proof that presidential politics have become strictly transactional. Vote for me and here’s what you will get in return. Trump promised a secure border and a better economy, which meant his supporters had to believe Biden’s was bad even when it was not. Vice President Kamala Harris seemed to offer something a tad more amorphous, which was “joy,” and a renewal of women’s rights regarding abortion.

Other dynamics included the fact that not enough men could bring themselves to vote for a woman, maybe especially one who is of color, and an insufficient number of women were willing to cast a ballot for Harris. Trump gained in almost every demographic, including Hispanics, Blacks, and Asians, and college-educated Whites. Babbling on about batteries and sharks and Hannibal Lecter seemed not to have impacted his constituency. The man was mad, about something, as was the electorate. They shared his anger but could not articulate why any more than their candidate. Nonetheless, America has spoken, and we have chosen disaster. The Republican dream of shrinking the size of government down until it can fit in a bathtub is about to be realized.

But Trump and his acolytes will also finish the job and drown it.

This article was originally published on Texas to the world.

James Moore is the New York Times bestselling author of “Bush’s Brain: How Karl Rove Made George W. Bush Presidential,” three other books on Bush and former Texas Governor Rick Perry, as well as two novels, and a biography entitled, “Give Back the Light,” on a famed eye surgeon and inventor. His newest book will be released mid- 2023. Mr. Moore has been honored with an Emmy from the National Academy of Television Arts and Sciences for his documentary work and is a former TV news correspondent who has traveled extensively on every presidential campaign since 1976.

He has been a retained on-air political analyst for MSNBC and has appeared on Morning Edition on National Public Radio, NBC Nightly News, Last Word with Lawrence O’Donnell, CBS Evening News, CNN, Real Time with Bill Maher, and Hardball with Chris Matthews, among numerous other programs. Mr. Moore’s written political and media analyses have been published at CNN, Boston Globe, L.A. Times, Guardian of London, Sunday Independent of London, Salon, Financial Times of London, Huffington Post, and numerous other outlets. He also appeared as an expert on presidential politics in the highest-grossing documentary film of all time, Fahrenheit 911, (not related to the film’s producer Michael Moore).

His other honors include the Dartmouth College National Media Award for Economic Understanding, the Edward R. Murrow Award from the Radio Television News Directors’ Association, the Individual Broadcast Achievement Award from the Texas Headliners Foundation, and a Gold Medal for Script Writing from the Houston International Film Festival. He was frequently named best reporter in Texas by the AP, UPI, and the Houston Press Club. The film produced from his book “Bush’s Brain” premiered at The Cannes Film Festival prior to a successful 30-city theater run in the U.S.

Mr. Moore has reported on the major stories and historical events of our time, which have ranged from Iran-Contra to the Waco standoff, the Oklahoma City bombing, the border immigration crisis, and other headlining events. His journalism has put him in Cuba, Central America, Mexico, Australia, Canada, the UK, and most of Europe, interviewing figures as diverse as Fidel Castro and Willie Nelson. He has been writing about Texas politics, culture, and history since 1975, and continues with political opinion pieces for CNN and regularly at his Substack newsletter: “Texas to the World.”

 

 

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Union calls for Julie Bishop to be sacked from ANU role over shocking comments

National Tertiary Education Union Media Release

The National Tertiary Education Union (NTEU) has called for Australian National University Chancellor Julie Bishop to be sacked after appearing to blame staff for the organisation’s financial woes.

ANU management has announced a restructure which risks more than 600 job losses, while also asking staff to forgo an already agreed pay rise of 2.5% in December.

Asked whether it was fair to ask ANU staff to forgo their December pay increase, the Ms Bishop told the Canberra Times:

“It depends to whom you refer, because many members of staff have been part of the inefficiencies that the university is now seeking to address.”

Ms Bishop also rejected suggestions of financial mismanagement, despite the ANU’s budgeted $60 million deficit ballooning to a forecast deficit of more than $200 million for 2024.

Quotes attributable to NTEU National President Dr Alison Barnes:

“These disgraceful comments blaming staff when it’s clear there’s been managerial incompetence are simply staggering.

“Bashing workers might have helped Ms Bishop climb through ranks of the Liberal Party but an attack like this makes her role as chancellor completely untenable.

“If Julie Bishop won’t resign today, she must be sacked. At a time when 600 jobs are on the line, blaming staff is reprehensible.

“This is emblematic of a broken governance system that needs an urgent federal parliamentary inquiry.”

Quotes attributable to NTEU ACT Division Secretary Dr Lachlan Clohesy:

“NTEU condemns the callous lack of contrition, empathy, and accountability displayed by the Chancellor.

“Her position as Chancellor of the Australian National University is untenable. NTEU calls for Julie Bishop to resign or be sacked.

“This blatant blame shifting exemplifies the lack of accountability in relation to university governance across Australia.

“We need an urgent federal parliamentary inquiry into university governance.”

 

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Homelessness

No home. No roof overhead. That’s a hell of a new and unwanted experience. Ignore what the YouTube Influencers say, you never sleep well in a car, surrounded by your worldly goods stuffed into a couple of bags, especially when you are old and not street smart.

But that is not the beginning, or even the end, of the story or the unfolding journey. Homelessness rarely just happens out of the blue like a capricious stealth strike from a malevolent Universe, there are always lead in signs, always indicators subtle or otherwise, always portents of the possibility of domicile discardation. I felt it coming in so many ways. The writing of that can wait for another time.

Right now, as I write this, within smell of my 72nd birthday, my existence is tagged by the number ****#. That is the keypad entry number to both the secure facility and the monk’s cell sized room I sleep in. All the people who live here live under a protective veil, and necessarily so, for many are escaping domestic violence, many are escaping the ravages of their own addictions, and others like me are finding temporary respite from the unrelenting internal pressure caused by the brutality of childhood abuse experiences and the unexpected removal of secure accommodation.

This environment, this institutionalised environment, reminds me so much of the Catholic Orphanage I grew up in. Not in the sense that it is rife with the abuse that the Orphanage was, for it is not, but rather because it is a very controlled environment. Everything happens under the gaze, for safety reasons, of CCTV, so privacy becomes a removed item. It is like living in a fishbowl where the observation and monitoring is as needed as the need to breathe is needed, for some of the people who temporarily live here have endured life experiences that would crush the souls out of smarmy judgemental types, and it is understandable if, on occasion, as I’ve been told, a touch of psychosis can reign.

Of course, I can simply leave anytime I like, it is not a prison. It is a Transitional Housing Facility offered up by the Qld Dept of Housing. It sits on the continuum between emergency accommodation at the sharp end, which I was afforded for a period, and the ultimate aim of a place of one’s own in the world of Social Housing.

This facility houses people from many backgrounds. There are women here escaping domestic violence, and there are women here who were divorce-dudded into totally unexpected penury and homelessness, and there are men here who have experienced the same. There are others, like me, with old age pensioner incomes, who were tossed out of once secure accommodation into the now unaffordable private rental market by property owners simply exercising their right to sell. There are people here with alcohol and other drug addictions, and some are quite ravaged by those addictions. Some are ex-prisoners on transition back into the world. Others here have fallen through the cracks in our mental health systems. Some of the people here are probably just like you, the reader, pretty normal folks, the only difference between them and you is that a perfect storm of unwanted experiences hit some of them at the perfectly wrong time. All that I am saying here is that judgement is an arsehole’s game and thankfully not everybody judges.

Homelessness has a feeling all of it’s own. It is a de-tethering from the comfort of sense of place, a rapid de-coupling from a personal environment carefully constructed with objects placed just so. The photos of the kids on that wall, that favourite coffee spot on the verandah, the very unscrutinised nature of just being, just being in your own chosen environment. All of that goes out the window and you are left holding the material aspects of your life in the couple of bags that each hand can hold. It becomes a brutal winnowing out process that dumps away what was once thought necessary.

I was quite surprised by the getting rid of things process, because there was nowhere to store everything. I’m a minimalist, even so, there was some amazement at the number of objects that crawled out of the woodwork when I was emptying out my place. Some things are now in plastic crates under a friend’s house. Some things went to Op Shops, some things were given away, some things couldn’t even be given away and ended up at the dump. Humiliating. The end of some treasured things.

Homelessness also contains many surprises that come from the far left of the left of left field. Within three days of landing on the street I was contacted by an Australia-based Survivor Advocate who stepped into my despairing mind space and who, with solid tangible help, enabled the creation of a viable pathway back to eventual independence. He knows who he is, I know who he is, and I am grateful.

So, I am in transition, on the path from where I was to where I will next be, with no great moans coming along for the ride. Nothing about the experience of being homeless compares in magnitude to my childhood abuse experiences, doesn’t come remotely close, and that fact helps me to maintain some perspective on what I am currently going through. Yes, being homeless is beyond difficult, it is hard, very unnerving, and it would be an empty glossing-up if I tried to pretend otherwise, but take it from me, there are far worse things than that in life. The sad thing is that any of these things exist at all.

Homelessness is eminently visible in our society and yet remains strangely unseen and seriously untackled. Yes, it affects the older poor like me, and the younger poor, but it also affects the working poor, and the lower middle class who never dreamed it could happen to them. It affects people who cannot care for themselves and it affects people who can. Homelessness holds up a mirror to the greed-based and profit from real estate at any cost nature of the society that we all live in.

And … I guess there are always personal lessons contained within the homeless experience, and I am finding some. The autistic traits I carry, which may be natural to me or may have been induced by childhood abuse and trauma, mean that I have an ingrained penchant for wanting to be invisible and unnoticed, and since one of the traits I carry is a low level of voluntary social interaction skills (hermitsville) … well … homelessness seems to grandly hit all of those buttons all at once because the invisibility of homelessness envelops like a cloak. Even I can see that I need to learn to become a bit more social, and a bit more visible, like, real quick.

So there you go … I see no particular value in complaining and blaming all and sundry on any issue. I write about how an experience feels, and this has been about homelessness and how it feels, to me. It strips artifice away, and it leaves you standing naked in the real.

 

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Weirdos – theirs vs ours

Weird, creepy or just plain nasty?

What I find truly weird is that when Kamala Harris’s campaign labelled bleach boy Donny T and his douche coupers as weird it cut through, yet insurrection, treason, rape, 39 proven felonies, a history of criminality, blatant grifting, daughter fondling, despot fawning and gibbering idiocies did not.

Trump is a spittoon for the overflow of every human personality defect housed within an orange-stuccoed pumpkin head topped by a bleached, road kill comb-over so by definition he’s also a weirdo but in his case weirdness is a comparative virtue. Anyway, his millions of thralls and cultists are anonymous, massed useful idiots but are far too numerous to qualify as freaks and exceptions but does quantity disqualify them as weirdos rather than somewhat offbeat normies? You decide.

 

 

Who are the notable weirdos in Trump world with whom we can compare our own?

Discount the grifters and sycophants. They may be egregious arseholes but their motivation is clearer than their weirdness – self-interest:

Rafael Edward (Ted) Cruz. Ol’ Jellyback who kissed Trump’s ring after Trump publicly called his wife ugly.

Rudolph William Louis (Rudy) Giuliani. Hair dye leaking, public sphincter loosening, nudger exposing Trump lawyer and victim of “everything Trump touches dies” (ETTD) syndrome. Too bad so sad, Rudy.

Alex Jones – conspiracy theory and Infowars fake news website creator is scum who exploits outrage for clicks. Karma kicked Jones in the plums when juries in Connecticut and Texas awarded a total of $1.487 billion in damages to a Sandy Hook shooting first responder and families of victims. Jones is worse than weird – he’s evil.

Ignore the dumb as a box of hair, noxious effluvia who are more accurately described as deeply, deeply and irredeemably stupid. And nasty:

She’s so far right she’s come full circle and disappeared up her own secessionist arsehole. She’s sporky minger Marjorie Taylor-Green of peach tree dish, Gazpacho police and Jewish space laser fame,

and

37 year old grandmother, Skanks-R-Us franchisee and public hand-job afficianado Lauren Bobert whose hubby was want to flash his frightener in bowling alleys.

Leading the way for the prominent and most committed of freaks is Elon Musk – Twitter troll and Howard Hughes-level, super rich weirdo.

“In 2018 Musk’s tweets were become (sic) so erratic and bizarre that Tesla investors had to tell him to basically ‘shut up’ as he was costing them money.” On Musk and his sale of Tesla shares.

He paid $44B to single-handedly destroy the value of the Twitter brand.

Musk’s son is called X Æ A-XII and his second child Exa Dark Sideræl. Three cars in the Tesla Model 3 series were going to be called Model S, Model E and Model X. He “likes to live-tweet his poops”. He accused one of the divers who rescued the Thai football team marooned in a cave in Thailand of being a paedophile.

He’s insecure; desperate for approval from the tech bros, the RWNJ Twitterati, the Heritage Foundation nutters and establishment media tycoons.

He’s a conspiracy spreading tinfoil hatter – tweeting that illegal immigrants are being shipped into the US so that they can vote Democrat. He’s an extremist existential threat to democracy

JDVance, the opportunistic, wannabe Trump Veep has been unfairly but believably accused of fornicating with furniture, becoming a viral meme and a drag on the Republican campaign as a result. That and his Handmaid’s Tale breeder weirdness. Vance’s boosting from Uday and Qusay Trump should’ve been warning enough for Donny Snr.

Steve Bannon, “The Leni Riefenstahl of the Tea Party movement”¹, populism’s grand strategist whose wardrobe was rescued from a trailer park dumpster. Virulently anti-establishment, impulsive and attention-seeking Bannon is an anarchist, a weirdo and a weirdo whisperer. (¹Andrew Breitbart, founder of Breitbart News).

Roger Stone, My Pillow guy Mike Lindell, Trump lawyer and co-conspirator Sidney Powell, failed GOP presidential hopeful Pudding Fingers Ron DeSantis of the creepy forced smiles and arch-villain Stephen Miller are all prominent weirdos.

House Speaker and hence 3rd in line for the Presidency, Mike Johnson, (tautology alert) a self-righteous christo-fascist shares a porn-monitor phone app with his son. Interrupting each other’s solo displays of affection? Weird.

* * * * *

How do our own RWNJs stand up to the competition posed by these American weirdos?

They’re nasty and they’re hateful. They are mendacious, grubby, bullying and incompetent and they’re world-leading hypocrites and pecksniffs but are they weird and are they creepy? Can they match the grotesqueries who populate Trumpistan? Who are they?

Barmy Joyce, the Englebert Humpastaffer and menace to sobriety from New England, emerges frequently from a wobbley-booted haze of hairy dogs and pink elephants to gormlessly opine on any and all matters, ranging from the effect of gay marriage on the beef trade to the coronavirus being less threatening than snakes (please know® that there have been 9 deaths attributed to snake bites in Australia in the 2020s so far and 9,859 deaths due to COVID-19 registered in 2022). Barmy is not weird, he’s just a fucking idiot. (®Gladdy Two-shoes Berejiklian).

Clive Palmer’s $100M senator and libido-suppressant Ralphie Babet, when not badgering the witness or answering to criminal damage and unlawful assault charges is desperately trying to raise his social media profile in the niche cooker market and to get noticed by the heavies within the MAGAe cult. Ralphie’s a bit of a tragic, look-at-me kinda non-achiever who fanboys Andrew Tate. Pathetic, creepy and yes, a fully-fledged weirdo. But easily ignored.

A “most powerful, divisive, and yet indestructible bureaucrat²” Mike Pezzullo the now sacked swarthy bard wrote in his 2021 Anzac Day speech “In a world of perpetual tension and dread, the drums of war beat – sometimes faintly and distantly, and at other times more loudly and ever closer”. An anti-China hawker, a practitioner of dark political arts and a fan of black-uniformed, armed goon squads Pezzullo is one weird dude. Rasputin or Machiavelli? Doesn’t matter anymore. (²A seasoned observer of Federal politics. Michael West Media).

Brother Stuie Robert. Less appealing than guiding Alan Jones into a glory hole this Nosferatu replicant is your run-of-the-mill happy clapping hypocrite. No weirder than venal, evangelizing prosperity gospellers everywhere. His inability to form an image in a mirror perhaps explains his lack of self-awareness.

Image coutesy of Craig Kelly. LOL.

Cray Cray Kelly – persona au gratin. When Clive Palmer was looking for potential UAP candidates he despatched a flunkey for a fact hunt. He returned with a picture of Craig Kelly. And so the whole “Our Next Prime Minister” weird farce was born.

Screwloose Lautrec, the homunculus Malcolm Roberts of One Notion made the short list 😎. He’s a weirdo’s weirdo, a RWNJ’s FRWNJ. He would’ve better served the country as sandwich spread for noted person of girth Gorgeous George Christensen but that shit has sailed. Roberts has identified himself as “Malcolm-Ieuan: Roberts., the living soul”. A sovereign citizen yet somehow at the same time a federal senator. Interesting mental gymnastics in that. Anti-vaxxer, climate denier, UN conspiracy believer and fervent weirdo, Malcolm’s the diminutive yet real deal.

Eric Abetz. He’s baaack… he didn’t die in a Berlin bunker. He’s been re-elected, this time to the Tasmanian House of Assembly, possibly due to Tassie’s weird Hare-Clark multi-member system. Eric is a relic, a coprolitic throw-back to the good old days of Anschluss and Liebenstraum. Royalist Abetz wants to keep the Windsors – he likes to think that’s one way the Germans will still be in charge. Is he weird? Who cares – he’s irrelevant. His Hitler Youth rosette-bedecked mini-me James Paterson is a bigger worry.

Within the Tory pantheon of wombat-headed, trainer-wheeled, bottom-feeding, mono-browed, hairy-palmed, goose-stepping, bobble-headed, undie-sniffing, pecker-headed, bottle shouldered detritus the three most consequential weirdos were each chosen to represent the clunge collective’s values to the voting public as worthy of national stewardship:

Captain Catholic the mad Abbott, a blatant, unapologetic sexist who appointed himself Minister For Women, was weirdly submissive to Mistress Cruella his dominatrix chief of staff, yet he affected a persona of sluggo-wearing machismo and a bow-legged amble that suggested his nutsack was badly prickled by nettles. Tones applied his LOTO style to the PMship and wondered why constant, carping negativity didn’t work when he was the government.

Easily out-weirding The Monk is of course Skiddy Morrison – self-described as God’s appointed representative. As the country and the world moved on around him The Great Schmo flattered himself with the title of ‘leader’. In his mind possibly The Great Leader or The Dear Leader; mistaking control freakery as leadership.

Cast your mind back to the images of Skiddy adoringly licking Trump’s earlobe, of his furtive fondling of strangers as some sort of creepy, evangelical conversion therapy. Recall his undergoing of Covid isolation with just his personal photographer, his hair washing as photo op, his “Great South Land of The Holy Spirit” dominionism, his self-congratulations at not having women protesters shot and his robust self-regard that withstood copious evidence that he was incompetent, and scandal riddled and weird.

“Morrison was only the harbinger of a worse politics to come.” (Bernard Keane, Crikey).

Spud Dutton, El Chippo, Herr Shickltuber, Adolph Kipfler, Gruppenfritter, Dick Tater… the potato-themed epithets are endless. A misanthrope’s dream – the man has the personality of a tuber and the warmth of a cold cup of sick. That he’s nasty is indisputable – an autocratic self-styled strong man who, Morrison-like, disappears when Tory-centred controversy arises, a truncheon-headed tough guy with a thin skin, a tormentor of the powerless and the dusky toned, a Bjelke-Peterson acolyte, a Gina Rinehart gofer.

His monotone drone, a blowie slowy circling the lounge room, reminds us he heads an ideas free zone, an Opposition defined by what it’s against. A thought bubble got out of hand and so he hoped that he could then use nuclear energy as a wedge on Labor’s energy policy. He has no intention of ever implementing such an unworkable boondoggle of course but it’s cheap politics over the national interest every time.

Spud as PM is like leaving the cat to guard your sashimi. A return to the Tories will reanimate their manifesto of blatant graft and favouritism that would give pause to Saudi royalty while the traditional Tory practices of incompetence and bastardry continue in the background.

OK, that’s all nasty and creepy but it’s standard Tory practice. Where’s the weird? I get a real sense that this bloke would get a kick from pulling the wings off butterflies. Let us hope that he doesn’t last long enough for us to find out.

* * * * *

Click the Like, post a comment, share the post. Encourage me to keep this shit going.

References

UAP Senator Ralph Babet was always quite weird. But lately he seems to be heading further down the MAGA-hole. Rachel Withers, Crikey. ($)

Mike Pezzullo. The demise of a Canberra’s “most powerful, divisive, and yet indestructible bureaucrat”. Michael West Media.

Mr Roberts has also written numerous reports claiming climate change is an international conspiracy fostered by the United Nations and international banks to impose a socialist world order. At least one report cites several anti-Semitic conspiracy theorists, including notorious Holocaust denier Eustace Mullins among its “primary references”.

One Nation senator Malcolm Roberts wrote bizarre ‘sovereign citizen’ letter to Julia Gillard. Michael Koziol. SMH 6/8/16. ($)

Mike Johnson Admits He and His Son Monitor Each Other’s Porn Intake. Rolling Stone.

This article was originally published on Grumpy Geezer

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Trust me – I’m a politician

Opposition Leader Peter Dutton is on a mission. The mission is to get the keys to the PM’s office at the next election. To achieve the objective, he will do or say whatever is necessary to garner as many votes as possible. The business plan is to say whatever he thinks is necessary – with his fingers tightly crossed behind his back.

We have recent experience with Dutton’s promise anything to get a vote strategy. On 9 September 2023, Dutton promised (assuming he is elected at the next election) to hold a second referendum on the recognition of first nations peoples in Australia, somehow getting done what the Albanese Government attempted to do without the malice and hatred. By 16 October 2023, conveniently a few days after the referendum failed, he (in that terminology so loved by the media to describe what is in essence a lie) ‘walked back’ the promise and was quoted as saying Australians were ‘probably over the referendum process for some time’.

The Dutton shadow cabinet has been highly vocal about wind turbines in general and in particular offshore wind farms. Some of the claims made are that marine animals will become disoriented because of the poles in the ocean, the poles will be damaged due to impacts with large aquatic mammals such as whales and they will be a blight on the coast line. If that were to be the case, why are these ill-effects only caused by wind turbines and not for example bridge pylons, oil rigs or jetties? The obvious answer is the claim is bollocks and similar to demonstrably false claims made by the only ex-president of the USA that is a convicted criminal. To make the claims even more laughable, guess who put the legislation through the Australian Parliament that allows for the installation of offshore wind turbines? Hint – it wasn’t the ALP. Angus Taylor (then Energy Minister) went as far as to say

An offshore electricity industry in Australia will further strengthen our economy. …Offshore generation and transmission can deliver significant benefits to all Australians through a more secure and reliable electricity system, and create thousands of new jobs and business opportunities in regional Australia.

Was Taylor wrong then or is Dutton wrong now?

Which brings us to Dutton’s nuclear future. Dutton and his shadow ministers are serving up claims that the government has no interest in the reduction of the cost of living for ‘ordinary Australians’. Apart from not defining ‘ordinary Australians’ so meaningful comparisons can be made, they were in power when a lot of the decisions were taken that created the current problems. However he is actively spruiking nuclear power as a better, cheaper and more reliable alternative to a ‘net zero’ future than renewable energy. The problem is that it isn’t.

Let’s look at cost. according to Peter Martin writing for The Conversation, respected magazine, The Economist recently produces a special edition that discussed the dawn of the solar age, arguing that solar energy production is growing exponentially. In fact

Installed solar capacity is doubling every three years, meaning it has grown tenfold in the past ten years. The Economist says the next tenfold increase will be the equivalent of multiplying the world’s entire fleet of nuclear reactors by eight, in less time than it usually takes to build one of them.

To give an idea of the standing start the industry has grown from, The Economist reports that in 2004 it took the world an entire year to install one gigawatt of solar capacity (about enough to power a small city). This year, that’s expected to happen every day.

Energy experts didn’t see it coming. The Economist includes a chart showing that every single forecast the International Energy Agency has made for the growth of the growth of solar since 2009 has been wrong. What the agency said would take 20 years happened in only six.

Ironically, the group that made the best estimate of the growth of solar energy is Greenpeace – although they also woefully underestimated the shift.

OK – so renewables are cheaper – how about reliability? Certainly solar panels are useless when the sun isn’t shining and wind turbines don’t do much when there is no wind

But the efficiency of batteries is soaring and the price is plummeting, meaning that on one estimate the cost of a kilowatt-hour of battery storage has fallen by 99% over the past 30 years.

In the United States, plans are being drawn up to use batteries to transport solar energy as well as store it. Why build high-voltage transmission cables when you can use train carriages full of batteries to move power from the remote sunny places that collect it to the cities that need it?

And why not move trainloads of batteries around? We’ve been moving coal, flammable fuels, oil and dangerous chemicals by rail and road for decades, with minimal risk. Australia is also investing in pumped hydro. This is designed to make money at night by supplying power when renewables can’t. Former Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull (an investor in pumped hydro) responds to the opposition’s claims here.

Ok – so renewables are cheaper and reliable – is nuclear better? Not really. Apart from having to safety store the life-threatening waste from nuclear plants for a extremely long time using extremely well built and secure storage sites, there is the cost of establishing a nuclear industry in Australia. The recent experiences of the UK and USA who already have the processes in place to manage nuclear power generation are telling. The USA’s Voglte power plant is 6 years late and $33Billion over budget. If that’s concerning, it’s nothing in comparison to the UK’s Hinkley Nuclear power station is currently 13 years late (originally expected online in 2017 – now possibly 2029) and $55 Billion over budget. The cost of the power generated is expensive in comparison to renewables as well.

If all of the problems above are surmountable, the killer blow is that nuclear power doesn’t work well with rooftop solar – despite Nationals Leader David Littleproud’s apparently support

The Nationals, he said, were not against renewable energy, only large-scale projects such as wind farms and transmission lines that were “tearing up the environment”.

Quite the opposite – the National Party wanted as many Australian households to get solar and batteries as would have them.

Like coal fired power stations, nuclear power stations work better and more efficiently if they are running at a constant rate. They are expensive to build, operate and maintain. It’s the real meaning of the term baseload and explains why power traditionally has been cheaper at night or on the weekend when the coal stations are still running and the power retailers have to find someone who will purchase the product. In contrast, installing solar panels is very quick, relatively inexpensive and can be used to store energy in a battery. But energy production is variable and depends on the environmental conditions on the day. The problem is explained by the ABC like this

… there are times in South Australia when rooftop solar alone can account for more than the entire demand for electricity in the state.

To ensure South Australia’s electricity system doesn’t blow up, virtually all other generators have to pare back their output to a bare minimum or switch off entirely.

And even then, South Australia’s surplus rooftop solar generation has to be exported to other states or wasted.

Rooftop solar can do this because it’s largely uncontrolled and flows simply by dint of the sun shining.

It was partly for this reason that South Australia’s only base-load coal plant retired in 2016.

Of course, there are many more times when rooftop solar provides precisely 0 per cent of South Australia’s power needs.

Which does nothing for the economics of a coal or nuclear power plant which operates best at a constant (flat out) rate.

In short Dutton cannot be trusted. His support for the second referendum evaporated almost before the claim was made. He would have been sitting around the Cabinet Table when the legislation to allow offshore wind turbines was discussed and approved and he is now making claims that he will sort out Australia’s transition to ‘net zero’ after the election proffering a solution that doesn’t stack up environmentally or economically.

Dutton wants to burden the country with an uncosted, untried energy system that is many times more expensive than the logical alternative, while harping about the cost of living. Talk about champagne tastes on beer budgets!

 

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So When IS Dutton Going To Announce His Policy On National Service?

I was going to call this: “You’re being divisive by not agreeing with me!” but I worried that it may just be lost with all the similar suggestions floating round the planet at the moment…

I’ve been very careful not to comment on the problems in the Middle East… And when I say problems in the Middle East, I’ve very careful not to use words like slaughter and innocent civilians and innocent aid workers and innocent Jewish hostages who were shot by innocent IDF soldiers who mistook them for guilty people because they were walking towards them bare-shirted with their hands in the air…

But the recent complaints from people that Bibi can’t be charged by the International Criminal Court can’t charge him AND the Hamas terrorists because of “moral equivalence”… On a point of pure logic this is ridiculous. It’s like saying that, “Officer, you can’t charge me with being over the legal limit because I believe that driver over there is not only over the limit, but he’s also driving a stolen car…”

Ok, I know that some people will immediately accuse me of being antisemitic even if I protest that I still watch Woody Allen films from time to time, but that’s what it’s like in Australia with that whole terrible political correctness 18C thing where you can’t be a bigot and offend people based on their religion, race or… Hey, weren’t the Liberals going to repeal that so we could all offend people left, right and centre? Or was it only left?

Poor Laura Tingle is in trouble because she had the temerity to suggest that a policy from Peter Dutton which blamed immigrants for our housing problem was somehow racist and may lead to people blaming immigrants for a lot of our problems. Doesn’t she know that people on the ABC should just stick to the facts like all those ones who suggest that Labor has stuffed up or that The Greens are too extreme or that all those Independents are really part of the same Teal party which has no constitution, rules or members…

Oh, I seem to strayed from my original point by trying to argue that we should all be equal under the law, even if we happen to be the leader of a country or President of the USA, and that basic human decency is a fine thing and any propaganda which says that it’s ok to treat people in a way that would have you universally condemned if you treated a puppy the same way should be put in the bin along with anyone who thinks that it’s forgivable because I’m only Goebbels and not the guy turning on the gas.

It seems like a rather inopportune moment to turn back to the topic I was originally going to talk about but there ya go!

Richie Sunak has got the winning formula for the Conservatives in the UK: National Service!

Ok, I don’t expect Labor to win Queensland but in my humble opinion, the Queensland Premier’s 50c public transport fare is more likely to win votes, even if not enough to win him an election… but it could get him a free ticket to the 50 Cent rapper’s next concert…

So, of course, Costello media immediately runs a poll about National Service in Australia… Not that Petey Costello has any connection to the current Liberal Party but one has to wonder if this is their way of finding out what we think because if they asked a polling company to do it, then someone would leak the idea that they were considering it.

Of course, you may point out that Peter Dutton has said nothing on National Service, which means that he undoubtedly has a policy on it that he’s not releasing. Or else he doesn’t have a policy on it but he’ll release one if the polls suggest that it might raise his polling enough that rising sea levels won’t drown him.

Sort of like his nuclear policy which is going in an electorate somewhere not near you… wherever you live!

 

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The AIJAC propaganda machine

By Evan Jones

The Australia/Israel and Jewish Affairs Council (AIJAC) is a constant presence in Australia’s mainstream media. Its predominant role is to defend the state of Israel come hell or high water.

Whenever someone appears in the media criticising Israel and/or supporting the Palestinian cause, AIJAC personnel pop up to set the reader straight. AIJAC complains about media bias regarding Israel/Palestine but it is perennially in the reader’s face. The AIJAC’s concept of balance involves no criticism of Israel nor pro-Palestinian coverage whatsoever.

AIJAC was formed in 1997 from a merger of the Australian Institute of Jewish Affairs and Australia-Israel Publications (edited by a certain Michael Danby). The emphasis of the two bodies appears to have been, respectively, on the Australian Jewish community and on Israel. The merged body’s emphasis appears to reside overwhelmingly in the unqualified defence of Israel – save for its active interest in opposing the attempted dilution of the 1975 Racial Discrimination Act (c/f Mathew Dunckley, Australian Financial Review, 9 November 2013).

The only area where AIJAC personnel have not rallied stridently to any Israeli action, no matter how heinous, is the Netanyahu Coalition government’s 2023 attempt to rein in the autonomy of Israel’s Supreme Court. Here, the public reaction turns to muffled incoherence.

AIJAC has been pathologically preoccupied with Iran and its nuclear program (e.g. Rubenstein, Australian Financial Review, 20 May 2005; AFR, 26 August 2008). Granted, Iran is an odious regime, but if Israel didn’t have a nuclear arsenal (which it acquired surreptitiously) would Iran be bothered to acquire its own? AIJAC supported US President Trump’s May 2018 abandonment of the 2015 JCPOA deal, claiming that Iran was secretly not adhering to the terms. All the major players claim the contrary.

AIJAC must be well resourced, because it rails against omnipresent ‘misinformation’ on and ‘malevolence’ towards Israel and, by its reckoning, such is to be found under every rock.

Some instances?

  • AIJAC (and its predecessor) hates the ABC. The lobby was especially furious when the unbowed Macquarie University’s Middle East expert Robert Springborg gave his expert opinions there. Australia-Israel Publications gave then Prime Minister Bob Hawke (ardent Israel-lover) a dossier on Springborg who used it to attack ABC management for its coverage of the Gulf War (Tom Burton, Sydney Morning Herald, 4 February 1991).
  • Mordechai Vanunu, a nuclear technician, disclosed details (out of conviction) of Israel’s nuclear program to the media in 1986. Soon kidnapped by Mossad, he has been deprived of his liberty ever since, inside and outside prison. AIJAC considers Vanunu to be a traitor, deserving of his life-long punishment (Letter, David Faktor, The Australian, 28 April 1998).
  • The International Court of Justice and the UN General Assembly decreed that the Israeli wall, built on Occupied Palestinian land, was illegal. AIJAC claim that the fence (sic) is a great idea because it has reduced the incidences of terrorism (Colin Rubenstein, Age, 15 July 2004). Rubenstein cares not to inquire into the violent Israeli origins of the violent Second Intifada.
  • Sometime Deputy Prime Minister Tim Fischer reminded AFR readers (Letter, AFR, 14 July 2006) of the knowing bombing and strafing by Israeli aircraft of the US intelligence ship USS Liberty, June 1967. Ted Lapkin (Letter, 17 July 2006) claimed that a Navy inquiry (‘conclusive and easily accessed’) concluded that the attack ‘was an unfortunate case of wartime friendly fire’, and that Fischer had resurrected ‘this long discredited calumny’. Survivors of the attack know that the truth is otherwise. Two letters from Greg O’Connor (AFR, 19 & 24 July 2006) provide authoritative sources providing evidence for a wilful massacre.
  • A ‘coalition of prominent Australian Jews … will challenge what it sees as extreme pro-Israeli bias among Jews in Australia’ in creating a new group, Independent Australian Jewish Voices (Ben Cubby, SMH, 6 March 2007). AIJAC’s Colin Rubenstein said the group was ‘dangerous and unrepresentative’. ‘They’re simply using their Jewish ethnic background’, he said. AIJAC’s Australian Jewish News reported the then visiting British Zionist author Melanie Phillips as labelling them ‘Jews for Genocide’.
  • ‘Israel’s 1948 Declaration of Independence described Israel as both Jewish and democratic while insisting all minorities have full and equal rights. … Contrary to false claims that Israel is considering instituting some sort of overt legal discrimination against Arab Israelis, this would be absolutely forbidden by Israeli constitutional law (as embodied by Israel’s Declaration of Independence, Basic Laws, and court precedents).’ (Ted Lapkin, SMH, 28 October 2010) Lapkin’s claims regarding the institutionalisation of non-discrimination in ‘Israeli constitutional law’ (Israel has no written Constitution) is ludicrous. Israel was created explicitly as an apartheid state (c/f Uri Davis, Apartheid Israel, 2003) and it remains so.
  • The distinguished retired South African (Jewish) judge Richard Goldstone was appointed to head the UN Fact Finding Mission on the [2008-09] Gaza Conflict. The Report was damning of the IDF and Hamas both, but especially of the Israeli force’s wanton killing of civilians. Goldstone faced extraordinary criticism and threats from Israel and its friends, with Goldstone sadly issuing a mea culpa for his previous honesty.

Rubenstein remained unrepentant of Goldstone’s confession under mental torture and threats of excommunication. Claimed Rubenstein: ‘Probably no document in the recent history of the Arab-Israeli conflict has done more damage to the reputation of Israel, nor contributed more to the international campaign to boycott and delegitimise it, than the Goldstone report. … Unfortunately, Goldstone’s change of heart cannot undo the massive, irreparable damage he and his co-commissioners have inflicted through their report. This damage is not only to Israel’s reputation but also to Middle East peace prospects, and to the very notion of a responsible and universal system of international law.’ (Rubenstein, The Australian, 12 April 2011)

  • AIJAC opposes the UN recognition of Palestinian statehood (e.g. Rubenstein, Age, 22 August 2011, Leibler, Age, 17 November 2011, Gartrell, SMH, 22 February 2017, James Massola & Matthew Knott, Age, 9 August 2023). Such recognition (citing Rubenstein) can only ‘reward bad behaviour and reinforce Palestinian intransigence’ (2017) and ‘will make it extremely difficult for Australia to present itself as a credible and effective advocate for a two-state peace … [as such it] is detrimental to Australia’s national interests’ (2023). Of which, more below.
  • ‘Yet Lyons vilifies us as holding extremely hard-line positions on Israel.’ (Rubenstein, Australian, 12 March 2014) John Lyons is of course correct. Lyons, then Australian journalist, fronted a ABC Four Corners program, ‘Stone Cold Justice, 10 February 2014, on Israel’s abusive treatment of Palestinian children. Fellow Murdoch columnist, the Israelophile Greg Sheridan (Australian, 1 March 2014), joined the attack against Lyons.
  • The Great March of Return began in March 2018, with Gazans rebelling against their long-term incarceration. AIJAC’s Tzvi Fleischer (Age, 18 May 2018) laments the ‘tragic and heartbreaking’ death of 60 Palestinians in one day but sheets the tragedy home to Hamas. Fleischer claims that the attack on the fence was armed and Israel merely returned fire with fire. Over 230 Gazans were murdered, and countless Gazans were kneecapped and disabled from snipers competing with each other for the highest count. The UN General Assembly and numerous Human Rights groups condemned the Israeli barbarity.
  • ‘The right of the Jews to their homeland was … formalised by the 1947 UN partition of Palestine into Jewish and Arab states.’ (Rubenstein, SMH, 15 May 2018) Their homeland? On the contrary. The UN General Assembly Resolution 181 (II), 29 November 1947, a product of threats and blackmail on lesser nations and great powers’ realpolitik (Truman needed funds from Jewish quarters for his 1948 Presidential election bid), had no formal authority whatsoever. The proposed partition was an unworkable farce. It was rendered irrelevant by the unilateral declaration of independence on 14 May 1948 by a cabal of Jewish terrorists.
  • AIJAC welcomes Trump’s moving of the US Embassy to Jerusalem (Rubenstein, SMH, 15 May 2018). Says Rubenstein: ‘[This] simply acknowledges the reality that Jerusalem has been Israel’s capital since 1948.’ No it hasn’t. Rubenstein recommends that Australia should follow suit (Age, 19 October 2018).
  • The assassination by Mossad of Hamas operative Mahmoud Al-Mabhouh in January 2010 used (amongst others) forged Australian passports. Cameron Stewart (The Australian, 27 February 2010) reports Jewish leaders claiming that alleged Israeli involvement in the murder is ‘inconclusive and unproven’. Stewart reports that the AIJAC ‘refused to comment’. The later publication of a memoir by Kevin Rudd, Prime Minister at the time, recounts that Mark Leibler, long time AIJAC Chairman, had aggressively berated him, Rudd, for the ‘hostile act’ of expelling an Israeli embassy staffer over the affair (Latika Bourke, SMH, 19 October 2018).
  • Melissa Parke was a federal Labor MP during 2007-16. Parke was primed to contest a Liberal-held seat in 2019 and she made a speech bitterly criticising Israel. Among other things Parke noted that (self-evident) Israel’s ‘influence in our political system and foreign policy is substantial’. AIJAC’s Colin Rubenstein claimed that Parke’s comments ‘are among the most extreme examples of anti-Israel rhetoric ever voiced in Australia’, being ‘outrageous, inflammatory’, and that they were representative of ‘the worst Israel haters’. Rubenstein further claimed that Parke’s speech was ‘nothing more than a laundry list of slanders, including discredited conspiracy theories and downright falsification’, accusing the Labor Party in her endorsement of ‘turn[ing] a blind eye towards fanatics and conspiracy theorists in their ranks’ (Paige Taylor, The Australian, 13 April 2019; James Campbell, Melbourne Herald-Sun, 13 April 2019).

Parke sued Rubenstein. In April 2021, the parties settled, Rubenstein formally apologising and withdrawing his remarks. Parke is a human rights lawyer with boots on the ground experience in numerous conflict zones, including Gaza; she speaks from close experience.

  • In January 2020, the US assassinated Iranian Major General Qasem Soleimani. Colin Rubenstein responded with ‘The case for killing arch-terrorist Soleimani’ (SMH, 10 January 2020), accusing him of effectively being single-handedly responsible for Middle-Eastern turbulence. Israel assassinated Hamas spiritual leader Sheikh Ahmed Yassin in March 2004. Prime Minister Ariel Sharon had threatened Yasser Arafat with assassination in September 2003 and again (along with Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah) in April 2004. On 1 April 2024, Israel, bombing the Iranian embassy in Damascus, assassinated Brigadier General Mohammad Reza Zahedi, with six other murders being collateral damage. Israel has a track record of targeted assassinations, so much so that Wikipedia has an extensive entry devoted to the phenomenon.

As Michael Leunig captioned in one of his iconic cartoons (Age, 24 September 2003): ‘Should Madge have Edna poisoned to stop her winning the rose competition. Hell yes! And bulldoze her home too! Go after her entire family! Winners are grinners!’. Rubenstein would approve.

  • AIJAC personnel have been vituperative regarding public figures who don’t adhere to the 100% pro-Israel line. This includes the politicians Bob Hawke and Bob Carr, previously prominent fellow travellers but who had a latter day mea culpa. Mark Leibler criticised his once close friend Hawke for the latter’s belated support for a Palestinian state (AFR, 16 February 2017). Bob Carr, then NSW Premier, was bitterly criticised for supporting the awarding of the 2003 Sydney Peace Prize to Hanan Ashrawi (Elisabeth Wynhausen, Australian, 10 June 2006), and later (as disclosed in Carr’s 2014 memoir) when Carr as foreign minister successfully overrode Prime Minister Julia Gillard’s pro-Israel obeisance in Australia’s UN voting stance (Rubenstein, Australian, 15 April 2014).

Other Israeli critics suffer the AIJAC blowtorch. Tim Fischer, Richard Goldstone, John Lyons and Melissa Parke (all as above). Add journalist Antony Loewenstein (Rubenstein, Australian, 19 April 2006); ex-Prime Minister Malcolm Fraser – ‘contradictions, factual errors, naivete’ (Mark Leibler, Age, 17 May 2008); Journalist Paul McGeogh – ‘sneering comment, inflammatory’ (Jared Owens, Australian, 5 June 2010); Zionist defector Peter Beinart – ‘grossly oversimplifying the American position’ (Tony Walker, AFR, 18 June 2010); NSW Labor MLC Shaoquett Moselmane (Sharri Markson, following an AIJAC-sponsored trip to Israel, Australian, 2 February 2016); Labor Senator Susan Lines (and, with her, Amnesty International) (Sharri Markson, Australian, 15 February 2022); Labor MP Tony Burke – ‘vile and ridiculous statements’ (Simon Benson, Australian, 28 October 2023; Ben Packham & Sarah Ison, Australian, 28 October 2023); Teal MP Zoe Daniel – ‘ill-informed, inflammatory’ (Rachel Baxendale & Tricia Rivera, Australian, 18 November 2023).

  • A bucketload of politicians and journalists/editors are jetted to Israel on a regular basis. Rubenstein claims that the AIJAC-funded trips are necessary ‘to help [Australians] understand the complexity of the Middle East’ (Phillip Hudson, SMH, 28 March 2009). Ah yes, and what a profitable investment. A conga line of journalists and others, post visit, write up their understanding of Israel in lily-white terms. The ‘complexity’ has disappeared, and with it the unwholesome character of Israel as an apartheid state. Witness: Michael Stutchbury (AFR, 20 November 2013); David King (Australian, 23 November 2013); Aaron Patrick (AFR, 27 November 2015); Sharri Markson (Australian, 2 February 2016); Geoff Chambers (Australian, 9 March 2024); Gideon Haigh – of all people! (AFR, 26 April 2024).
  • Finally, AIJAC spokespeople have persistently claimed that they want a two-state solution but that they have no partner for peace (e.g.: Rubenstein, SMH, 11 March 2002; Rubenstein, AFR, 18 April 2002; Letter, Lauren Jones, SMH, 26 June 2002; Rubenstein, AFR, 4 July 2002; Rubenstein, AFR, 30 April 2003; Rubenstein, AFR, 5 June 2003; Rubenstein, Age, 9 September 2003; Letter, Rubenstein & Others, Age, 12 November 2003; etc., ad infinitum).

AIJAC personnel lament the consistent failure of the Palestinians to make ‘concessions’. The Camp David meetings in July 2000 is the touchstone. AIJAC personnel reproduce the successfully implanted Western propaganda that Prime Minister Ehud Barak offered the world but Palestine leader Yasser Arafat walked away. Instead, goes the story, the Palestinians unleashed unprovoked murderous violence.

Contrary accounts are given by various authors – in particular, Thomas Malley (US President Bill Clinton’s then special assistant for Arab-Israeli affairs, a dispassionate observer), Tanya Reinhart (Israeli linguistics academic and anti-Zionist journalist and author), Charles Enderlin (French Jerusalem-based correspondent) and Amnon Kapeliouk (Israeli Arabist journalist). Thus:

  • Thomas Malley, ‘Camp David: The Tragedy of Errors’, New York Review of Books, 9 August 2001 (with Hussein Agha)
  • (summary version) Malley, ‘Fictions About the Failure At Camp David’, New York Times, 8 July 2001
  • Tanya Reinhart, Israel/Palestine: How to end the war of 1948, 2002
  • (summary version) Reinhart interview, ZNet, 8 November 2002
  • Charles Enderlin, Shattered Dreams: The Failure of the Peace Process in the Middle East, 1995-2002, 2003 (translated from the French, Le Rêve Brisé, 2002)
  • (summary version) Alain Gresh, ‘Camp David’s Thwarted Peace’, Le Monde Diplomatique (English edition), July 2002
  • Amnon Kapeliouk, ‘Camp David Dialogues’, Le Monde Diplomatique, September 2000; ‘Conducting Catastrophe’, Le Monde Diplomatique, February 2002

No concessions? At Oslo, September 2003, Arafat unilaterally (without consulting his negotiating team) agreed to recognising Israel at the June 1967 borders, conceding to Israel 78 percent of Palestine/Israel. It wasn’t enough.

Israel failed to adhere to its Oslo agreements. Thus Malley/Agha (NYRB, 2001):

‘Seen from Gaza and the West Bank, Oslo’s legacy read like a litany of promises deferred or unfulfilled. Six years after the [1993] agreement, there were more Israeli settlements, less freedom of movement, and worse economic conditions.’

Kapeliouk (2002) concurs:

‘In the diplomatic stagnation – with the third scheduled [troop] redeployment not implemented, with more Jewish settlements being built and bypass roads paved, land confiscated, closures and deepening economic crisis, with hundreds of prisoners waiting for years to be released under agreements already signed – the ploys concerning Jerusalem [in particular, the status of East Jerusalem and of the Temple Mount/Haram al-Sharif] were like a fuse.’

Barak was arrogant (he refused to meet Arafat) and deceitful (he committed nothing to paper). Reinhart (Israel/Palestine) notes: ‘… official claims about Barak’s offers come with no documentation to substantiate them’.

Kapeliouk (2000) claims: ‘Barak played an open hand, and the name of the game was diktat.’ He wanted a public showdown (Malley/Agha: ‘high-wire summitry’), refusing Arafat’s pleas for preliminary negotiations. Arafat feared a trap; his fears were well-grounded. Barak wanted a ‘final agreement’ that would (intolerably) vitiate UN resolutions past and future.

Remarkably, conventional Western accounts of Israel-Palestine interaction decline to acknowledge its profound asymmetry – an Occupying Power engaged in ethnic cleansing vis-à-vis a subject population. Israel’s origins and character have conveniently disappeared from history. In sideline exchanges in Stockholm prior to Camp David, the hardline Shlomo Ben-Ami (then Minister for Internal Security) claimed to his Palestinian counterpart: ‘You don’t have the power to get what you’re asking for, so be realistic and take what you’re offered.’ (Kapeliouk, 2000)

Reinhart (Israel/Palestine) elaborates:

‘Apart from the facts, the biggest distortion in the dominant perspective of Camp David has been the symmetry it imposes on the two sides – that they were both facing equal sacrifices that the rejectionist Palestinians were not willing to undertake.’

Malley sums it up: ‘But the measure of Israel’s concessions ought not be how far it has moved from its own starting point; it must be how far it has moved toward a fair solution.’ (Malley, NYT, 2000) More: ‘The final and largely unnoticed consequence of Barak’s approach is that, strictly speaking, there never was an Israeli offer.’ (Malley/Agha, NYRB, 2001).

AIJAC’s decades-long pronouncements highlight that its personnel dwell in a parallel universe. It is a record of high-class charlatanry. How can AIJAC personnel, all well-educated, construct a fabulous version of a subject on which they devote their waking hours? The media has been generally happy to oblige AIJAC’s threadbare homilies.

Ironically, AIJAC complains about the Nine papers (Age, Sydney Morning Herald) not publishing one of its letters. It was sent in response to a column by Marc Purcell, CEO Australian Council for International Development (Age/SMH, 18 April 2024). Purcell claims that: ‘The evidence that the Israeli government is deliberately starving civilians in Gaza is unequivocal’. Evidence of media bias against Israel defenders? Rather, the denying of Israel’s Gazan starvation strategy (a longstanding affair) may have been too much for the normally acquiescent letters editors to bear.

No doubt, undaunted, AIJAC will continue to flood Australia’s ‘quality’ press with its defence of the indefensible.

This article was originally published on Pearls and Irritations and has been republished with permission.

Evan Jones, now retired, lectured in political economy at Sydney University for 34 years. His current preoccupations are malpractice in the Australian banking sector, French politics, and mainstream media disinformation.

 

 

 

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Streisand Effect To Be Renamed After Gina Rinehart

Gina Rinehart…

We’re often asked to believe that she’s an intelligent woman, but I do have to ask has she not heard of the Streisand effect…

Which is – to quote Wikipedia – “The Streisand effect is an unintended consequence of attempts to hide, remove, or censor information, where the effort instead increases public awareness of the information.” When Barb tried to suppress a photo of her clifftop mansion it only led to more exposure than if she’d simply ignored the photo… significantly more exposure… so much exposure that the wikipedia entry I quoted actually has the photo.

So, while I haven’t been to the gallery where this portrait is hung, I have seen about thirty memes reproducing the portrait in themes such as Grant Wood’s “American Gothic” and Munch’s “The Scream”… And if it weren’t for the complaints from Gina and the swimming team she sponsors who I assume all did it voluntarily and not because they thought that she’d remove sponsorship because Gina ain’t the sort of person who behaves in a vindictive way… she has politicians and newspaper editors who do that for her.

Given that Ms. Rinehart has managed to accumulate wealth due to her canny knack of investing well and having a rich parent who gave her the wealth to invest… two things her children seem to lack, we must assume that she knows what she’s doing…

Therefore I must conclude that she’s heard of the Streisand effect and that her complaints about the painting are just her way of ensuring that it’s shared far and wide.

Of course, we shouldn’t be mocking Gina because of her appearance… We should be mocking Peter Dutton because of his. Not what he looks like. Because of his appearance at her party even though he spent more time travelling than actually being there!

 

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The Harman Undertaking

A most disturbing revelation, with profound repercussions for victims of rape and sexual assault, was made by former Channel Seven Spotlight producer Taylor Auerbach in his evidence in the defamation action brought by Bruce Lehrmann against Channel Ten and Lisa Wilkinson.

Lehrmann is alleged to have raped staffer Brittany Higgins in the parliament house office of then Defence Minister Linda Reynolds, in March 2019. His criminal trial was aborted due to juror misconduct.

Auerbach alleged that Lehrmann supplied Seven with privileged material given by Ms Higgins to the AFP, material that was not used in his criminal trial. It is also alleged that Lehrmann airdropped the entire police E-brief to Auerbach, while the two were on a golfing trip.

According to a News.com report:

“Network 10’s barrister Dr Matt Collins has told the court that Bruce Lehrmann breached legal principles by providing Seven with documents from his ACT Supreme Court trial.

Mr Auerbach, in an affidavit tendered to the court, said Mr Lehrmann provided him with the AFP “statement of facts” from Mr Lehrmann’s criminal trial.”

The police statement of facts was provided to the defendant and his lawyers by the AFP, as is customary. Lehrmann and his legal team were then obliged by their responsibilities to the Harman Undertaking to use the documents “only for the purposes for which they were disclosed, and not for collateral or ulterior purposes.”

In short, the text messages, phone records and diary extracts supplied by Ms Higgins to the AFP, included in the brief of evidence and not used in the trial, should never have been released to the media. To do so was to breach the Harman Undertaking.

In theory such a breach can lead to a charge of contempt of court and, if you are a lawyer, a complaint to the Legal Services Commission.

As Ms Higgins stated in late July 2023, she provided the material to the AFP to assist in the prosecution of her alleged rapist:

“Reminder – this is my phone data I provided to the AFP to prosecute my rape case.

“None of it was tabled in court.

“And now, it continues to be leaked to the media without my consent.”

She said that the leaks represented “such a dangerous precedent to tolerate a victim’s private data to be weaponised in this manner without any recourse.”

Mr Auerbach alleged in April 2024 that Mr Lehrmann was responsible for supplying the privileged material to Seven. It is unclear who first released the privileged information to Janet Albrechtsen of The Australian in the middle of 2023.

It is important to note here that Mr Lehrmann has consistently and vigorously denied the rape allegations and denied that he is the source of the information from the police brief.

It’s telling that while there’s been a steady leak of evidence not used in Lehrmann’s criminal trial, there has been a remarkable lack of protest about the leak of that privileged material and the breach of the Harman Undertaking the leaking represents. There’s no shortage of salacious coverage of the content of the leaks, but considerably less commentary on the illegality of the act of leaking them.

Unless penalties are imposed on those who abuse their privileged access to police evidence such breaches will continue, to the detriment of victims, particularly in rape and sexual assault cases. As things stand, a complainant would do well to hurl her phone into the nearest body of water rather than give it to investigating police for inclusion in a brief to which her alleged perpetrator has access.

It seems an entirely untenable situation and one that can only be addressed if there is the legal and political will to address it. There is a clear framework in place for the prosecution of offenders, however, so far, nobody seems particularly interested in using it.

So when in September 2023 I was informed that the police brief of evidence in the Lehrmann Toowoomba matter had been obtained by an individual with no standing in that matter, who did not meet the criteria for access to that brief under Queensland law, I decided to do something about it.

Bruce Lehrmann was charged with of with two counts of raping a woman in Toowoomba, Queensland in 2021, shortly after he appeared in court in the ACT on charges of allegedly raping Brittany Higgins. Witnesses in the Toowoomba matter will be cross examined by Lehrmann’s counsel in a committal hearing in June 2024.

The individual who obtained the Toowoomba police brief relayed chunks of information from the brief to two other individuals, who, without knowledge of the other’s involvement, passed on the information to me. Both parties named the same individual as their source.

I have of course no evidence of who leaked the brief, and no knowledge of the intentions of the individual who benefitted from the leak. However, I was and remain sufficiently horrified by this breach occurring for the second time in two separate matters concerning the same accused person, that I decided to take whatever action I could.

On September 14, 2023, I lodged a complaint with the Queensland Crime and Corruption Commission about the leak of the Toowoomba police brief to the individual.

On 26 October 2023, the Daily Mail published an article headlined: “Full details of rape accusations against Bruce Lehrmann after meeting alleged victim at a Toowoomba strip club – and when she came forward.”

Journalist Kylie Stevens attributes as her source a court brief she states was “obtained exclusively by The Australian“:

“According to a court brief obtained exclusively by The Australian newspaper [paywalled], the pair used cocaine during the night.’

The Australian headline is upfront about its source:

Cocaine, unprotected sex: Police brief reveals new charges.

Details of allegations against former Liberal staffer Bruce Lehrmann can be revealed…”

Journalist Samantha Maiden also wrote a piece for News.com on October 26, detailing some of the police allegations without naming a source.

On 2 November 2023, I updated my complaint to the Queensland CCC to include these three articles.

Several weeks later, the Queensland CCC advised me that they would not be pursuing my complaint.

I’ve now decided to make the complaint again, in the light of current evidence provided by Mr Auerbach and concerns expressed by Dr Collins at the breaching of the Harman Undertaking in Lehrmann’s first trial. It appears that the Undertaking may have already been breached in the Toowoomba matter, before it has even come to trial.

We are talking about what is supposed to be a fundamental protection for victims of rape and sexual assault who choose to make a complaint to police, being used by the perpetrator, or someone who has privileged access to the police brief, to intimidate, harass, and humiliate complainants. It is astounding that this abuse of the legal system has not received anything like the attention it deserves. It is one more obstacle in a field filled with obstacles that can and do deter women from seeking justice after enduring rape and sexual assault.

Why are authorities such as the Queensland Crime and Corruption Commission, and the relevant body in the ACT, failing to investigate these leaks?

 

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New Zealand is under siege by the Atlas Network

Just as the Atlas Network-connected Advance body intervened in the Voice referendum in Australia and, in recent weeks, a by-election, similar organisations spawned from the American model are distorting New Zealand’s politics from within as well as from without.

One of the key researchers into the Atlas Network, Lee Fang, observed that it has “reshaped political power in country after country.” In America, every Republican president since Ronald Reagan has begun office with a Roadmap provided by the Heritage Foundation, primary Atlas Network partner. The “Mandate” for 2025 puts America on a hard path to fascism should a Republican win in November. Britain’s economy and standing have been savaged by Atlas partners’ impacts on the Tories. In New Zealand, the recently-elected rightwing coalition government is aping the new “Atlas president” of Argentina, aiming to privatise national assets, but is increasingly also imitating Atlas strategies recently seen in Australia, inflaming racial tensions and harming the wellbeing of Māori people.

Dr Jeremy Walker called Australia’s attention to the local Atlas partner organisations’ impact on the Voice to Parliament referendum and is now helping draw together the focus on the New Zealand partners’ very similar distortion of their national debate. There is a deep racism at the heart of this ultra-free market ideology that has licensed the international right to exploit resources and people around the globe untrammelled, largely in American corporate interest, but more broadly for any corporation or allied sector big enough to be a contender. (They do not, by contrast, fight for the renewable energy sector’s interests, as a competitor to their dominant fossil fuel donors; this shapes their climate crisis denial and delay, and colours their loathing of First People’s capacity to interfere with their profits by environment-driven protest. A sense of Western Civilisation as the apex of human existence and deep disdain for non-Western cultures also pervade the network.)

The Atlas model is to connect and foster talent in the neoliberal sphere. Young men (mostly) are funded or trained to replicate the talking points that Ultra High Net Worth Individuals (UHNWI) and lobbyists have built into a global network of over 500 bodies in 100 nations. The fact that neoliberal orthodoxies are more religious ideology that fact-based theories explains why their impact has been so utterly disastrous everywhere they have reshaped societies. The goal is to spawn replicating bodies with benign-sounding names that promote the UHNWI and corporate talking points – but with a veil hiding the self-interest that is obvious when those groups speak for themselves. Some of the bodies feign being thinktanks, which George Monbiot recently renamed junktanks to clarify their disingenuousness. Others are “astroturf” organisations that pretend to be grass roots bodies representing popular opinion. Another model is the beach-head in universities, an independent organisation within those institutions intended to dignify the neoliberal religion and the chosen strategies, including climate denial. All these produce material to fill civic debate and train more acolytes to enter politics, strategy companies and junktanks. Mainstream media elevates their standing by hosting their operatives as experts without explaining that the benign-sounding organisation to which they belong is a foreign-influence operation’s local outlet.

These groups damage local conditions to favour international corporations. They lobby for the removal of the “regulations” that are actually protections for the public – as workers, as consumers, as residents. They push for the privatisation of national treasures so that (often foreign) corporations can exploit the profits at the expense of the public. The greater the damage to the local democracy, the easier it is for them to act unimpeded. The stronger their infiltration of the media, the harder it is for the local electorate to understand the stakes. The politicians and strategists that emerge from the sphere (or are its allies) know that none of this wins votes, so they fill the space with culture war division to distract the voter from paying attention. Race and sexuality are their most obvious targets, as reactionary nostalgia for a mythical past of white picket fences pervades their ideology: a valorisation of “Christianity” and “family” and the “sacredness of marriage” (preached by adulterous politicians) is equally apparent in their propaganda.

The coalition that took power in NZ late in 2023, after a campaign centred on attacking the country’s founding Waitangi Treaty, has considerable Atlas infiltration. There is concern about Atlas fossil fuel and associated tobacco interests perverting policy in parliament, as well as senior ministerial aides who might be compromised. The government has promised to repeal Jacinda Ardern’s ban on offshore gas and fuel exploration, plans to sell water to private interests, not to mention planning to enable the selling off of “sensitive” NZ land and assets to foreign corporations, just as Argentinian Milei is intending.

One of the government members, the Act Party, began its existence as an Atlas partner thinktank and continues that close connection. It was founded by former parliamentarian Denis Quigley with two members of the Mont Pelerin Society (MPS), the Atlas Network’s inner sanctum. One, Roger Douglas, was responsible for Rogernomics in NZ which has been described as a “right wing coup” that worked to “dismantle the welfare state.” The other, Alan Gibbs, who has been characterised as the godfather of the party, and a major funder, argued Act ought to campaign for government to privatise “all the schools, all the hospitals and all the roads.” This may not be surprising since he made much of his fortune out of the privatisation of NZ’s telecommunications.

The Act Party is currently led by David Seymour who functions as a co-deputy prime minister in the government. He has worked almost his entire adult life within Atlas partner bodies in Canada and boasts a (micro) MBA dispensed by the Network. In Seymour’s 2021 Waitangi Day speech, he acknowledged his “old friends at the Atlas Network.” In light of that, his recent disdainful and absolute dismissal of the party’s connection to Atlas in an interview was telling: he clearly felt the association was damaging enough to lie outright.

Seymour is also deeply antagonistic to policies dedicated to repairing the disadvantage suffered by Māori people, disingenuously describing provisions that work cooperatively with Māori people as the “dismantling of democracy.” He appears antagonistic to Māori culture.

Another Atlas partner that has been key to distorting debate in NZ is the Taxpayer Union (TPU) which is emblematic of the production of metastasising bodies central to the Atlas strategy. Its co-founder and executive director is another graduate of the Atlas (micro) MBA program. Jordan Williams (currently “capo di tutti capi” of the Atlas global alliance of anti-tax junktanks) laughably depicts Atlas as a benign “club of like-minded think tanks.” He created, however, a body called the Campaign Company which helped radicalise the established farmer power base in NZ politics, planting sponsored material in the media. Williams claimed to grant the farmers “world-class campaign tools and digital strategies.” He also co-founded the Free Speech Union (FSU), which is unsurprisingly fighting regulation of the damaging impact of internet disinformation as well as fostering culture war battles.

A further spin-off of the bodies illustrates the increasing ugliness of the populist strategies. A former Act Party MP has founded the New Zealand Centre for Political Research which is fomenting civic division against Māori interests, including placing hate-mongering advertisements in the media.

The Act Party (alongside the populist New Zealand First party) is at the heart of the coalition government’s intention to destroy NZ’s admirable efforts to promote Māori interests for the betterment of the commonwealth, including the co-governance innovation. Efforts to undo disadvantage and programs that have promoted the distinctive NZ democratic experiment are set to be dismantled. A “massive unravelling” of Māori rights is at stake.

It is not only Māori people who will suffer. The NZ coalition government is also attempting a kind of “shock therapy” that did so much to tip first Chile and then other “developing” nations into brutal pain in pursuit of market “freedom.” The MPS was at the heart of Pinochet’s neoliberal brutality, resulting from Nixon’s injunction to make the Chilean economy scream.[1] New Zealand now faces cuts to a range of services, welfare and disability payments, even while the new PM, one of NZ’s wealthiest ever holders of the role, charged the taxpayer NZD 52,000 to live in his own property. It’s important to remember that this kind of entitlement is the sort that the neoliberals like, alongside subsidies to industry and corporations.

Lord Hannan (one of Boris Johnson’s elevations to the peerage, and a junktank creature) recently spoke in NZ, welcoming “all the coalition partners around this table” to hear his oration. There he celebrated the small percentage of GDP that NZ’s government spends on its people, cheering on the TPU’s power. He also disdained the “tribalism” that has dictated recognition of First Peoples’ suffering. There is grand (but unsurprising) irony in a graduate of three of Britain’s preeminent educational institutions dictating that humanity’s essential equality is all that can be considered when devising policy, particularly in settler-colonial nations.

Amusingly the weightier debunking of the Atlas connections has come from: Chris Trotter, formerly centre left, now a council member of Williams’ FSU; Eric Crampton, chief economist of the New Zealand Initiative, NZ’s leading Atlas partner and Sean Plunkett whose “anti-woke” vanity media platform, Platform, is plutocrat funded and regularly platforms the NZI talking heads.

While Atlas’s system largely functions to connect and train operatives, as well as acting as an extension of American foreign policy, this modest-seeming program must not be ignored. We have a handful of years to achieve a monumental shift from fossil fuel towards renewable energy: Atlas partners aim to ensure this does not take place.

And Atlas partners will push us at each other’s throats while we procrastinate.

[1] That MPS intervention resulted in massive unemployment, extraordinary inequality, and fire-sale prices of national assets to cronies. Much of Chile’s later success is as likely to be attributable to the trade requirements of (statist) China whose demand for copper has done so much to enrich Chile.

 

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Here’s ya hat, what’s ya hurry?

Skiddy leaves his mark

Full of shit and full of himself, Scooter has left the building.

His greatest contribution to Australian governance is his departure from it. A vacuous blowhard given to bovine slogans, a Pentecostal nutter convinced of celestial endorsement from a deity whose prosperity ethos luckily aligns with his own, yet he was also sufficiently self-aware as to disguise his odious actuality with his daggy dad artiface and endless photo-op dress-ups.

The ever-present, punchable smirk belied any of his claims to humility; rather it underlined his belief in his own devine exceptionalism – a would-be theocrat thwarted by secular reason:

“God’s kingdom will come. It is in his hands, we trust in Him. We don’t trust in governments.” (Preaching at the Victory Life Centre in Perth, 2022).

Following the electorate’s clear gag reflex at the notion of this disingenuous gobshite continuing to represent the values of our country the image of a now forlorn figure on the Opposition’s backbench nose-bleed seats ironically elicited some entirely undeserved empathy. Scrolling his phone hoping someone had returned his calls, his “if you’re good at your job, you’ll get a job” banality taking its time to manifest itself, he was due instead the forensic grilling by a no-nonsense Catherine Holmes at the Robodebt Royal Commission where he distinguished himself as a practised sophist and blame shifter. And, due also, the ignominy of his too-clever-by-half ‘secret ministries’ parliamentary censure – a loose equivalent to the impeachment of his orange BFF and fellow twatwaffle Dorito Donny.

History will record, and many will now recall his many failings – his cravenness and inaction in the face of adversity, his ducking of accountability, his claiming of the success of others, his malice and bullying, repurposing taxpayers’ money to cronies and right-wing supplicants – all manifestations of his lack of character.

A shrivelled, one-dimensional intellect, a light-weight incapable of reflection or forethought with underlying smarm and personality defects, mentored by a proselytizing grifter and informed by an eagle painting he was impervious to self-reflection – comfortable in the belief he was the Chosen One.

In his departing sermon presented as a valedictory speech he professed “faith in Jesus Christ, which gives me the faith to both forgive but also to be honest about my own failings and shortcomings” which he then failed to be honest about by neglecting to mention any.

Manifestly unsuited to the job he is a study in how megalomania, verbal diarrhea, treachery and happenstance can reward a shameless fabulist and serial failure.

A creationist’s literal belief in biblical fables and his related, rampaging case of gynophobia are the 2 standouts in his compendium of personality defects.

He was visibly confused by the notion that women are equal.

He referred to females, including ministers, by their 1st names, men by their titles.

He mansplained over the top of his senior minister Anne Ruston when she was asked about the Lib government’s treatment of women.

Women to him were packaging:

“1st party room as PM. B4 media came he requested all women MPs move seats & sit in front of him. As props. For the cameras. When media left, Scott’s men took their seats” (Julia Banks, former member for Chisholm).

Counsel for all things female, the eponymous “Jenny”, was required to alert him to the unacceptability of rape via reference to his own daughters.

“I’ve had plenty of mates who have asked me if they can be my special envoy to sort the issue out with Pamela Anderson” he told Gold Coast radio station Hot Tomato FM. Wink, snerk, guffaw, eh? eh? Imagine that pasty slug pawing a woman. No actually. Don’t do that.

He did get handsy with unsuspecting disaster victims, admitting to copping a quick feel as some sort of subliminal, evangelical healing process by his God’s emissary – himself.

Inanity and beyond was a feature of the slogan bogan – each facile declaration followed by the smirk as if he’d passed on an inspirational maxim. The restraint shown by not shooting women protesters is a standout for the clueless galoot as was his spittle-flecked tirade against Christine Holgate who had the audacity to be a strong female role model as chief postie.

Which brings me to his trademark malice and bullying:

“The pattern is that if you attack Scott Morrison… he will lash out and background against you in the most vicious of ways.” (Samantha Maiden, The Drum).

This godly man, this humble servant of a benevolent divinity was ever eager to punch down, to victimise, torment, ignore and defame. Toddlers, Kopika, and Tharnicaa, asylum seekers, grannies,the unemployed. If some died, they died – his conscience was clear.

The black hole of honesty (truth bends around him) cultivated a regime where rorting was not a crime but a credential. The open disdain he held for established and trusted institutions went beyond the traditional Tory aversion to acountability – his God’s will over-ruled any and all. Science? Evidence? Proof? Veracity? Phhht!

When he needed to step up he stepped out; when opportunity arose to show true leadership he hid behind the curtains. He was anti-anti-corruption, aesthetically unpleasant, duplicitous and wantonly cruel.

His loyalty is transactional – Brother Brian? Who? Brother Stuie? Who? His most valuable gofer was his photographer. His closest confidante fled for the exit as an integrity commission was coming to fruition.

He claims credit for two issues as stand-out big wins for his legacy – the response to Covid and the AUKUS pact. Let us remain mindful of the context:

Australia came through the worst of Covid better than most. This is not due to The Galoot who was tardy with vaccines – worsening lockdowns and blaming the premiers. He, and cherubic Rubbery Figures Frydenberg were dragged kicking and screaming by the premiers (and, FFS, Igor Mortis John Howard) to implement the JobKeeper initiative of Greg Combet and Sally McManus.

AUKUS cedes our residual sovereignty to the Americans for decades and for a brain-bleeding price. Delivery is on the never-never and we can be sure the Seppos will bill us for every one of their inevitable FUBARS.

It looked for too long a while that we’d never be rid of The Galoot – stuck like a clock spring on the soap. Now to be referred to in the past tense, his name should become a verb synonymous with opportunistic duplicity – “That car yard sold me a lemon. I was Morrisoned.”

 

 

“He departs the parliament having scarred democracy, diminished trust in government, creating a legacy of shallow politics and photo op policies, of raising the individual above the collective, of switching the story to fit the circumstances; of above all, advancing Scott Morrison.” (Amy Remeikis, The Guardian).

 

Worst ever PM. Fuck off!

References

As Scott Morrison leaves Parliament, where does he rank among Australian prime ministers? The New Daily

Decoding ScoMo: the hidden story and messages in his Pentecostal mashup. Crikey ($)

 

This article was originally published on Grumpy Geezer.

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Money, money, money. It’s a rich man’s world.

The headline conveys a tale of acquisition, narcissism, and unimaginable wealth. The world is overflowing with money inherited, earned honestly or obtained through corrupt means. Nevertheless, little is acquired through equal opportunities. It is a world where the rich have a significant advantage. It is a rich man’s world.

Let’s begin our investigation with some sobering statistics.

Last year, before legislation to fix the problem, research by the Australia Institute 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.”

And Oxfam’s latest report, “Inequality Inc.,” said that the income of Australia’s 47 billionaires doubled in the last two years to $255 million.”

If you are amazed by those numbers, you are not alone. I am, too. Never before have the wealthy been so well taken care of.

Tax avoidance through family trusts is also an industry unto itself.

“Earnings can be allocated to family members with low income from other sources so that the taxable income attracts the lowest tax rate possible.

In some circumstances it is possible to reduce the tax bill to almost zero.”

As if that’s not enough:

“The rich also get rewarded with tax concessions to employ armies of lawyers, financial consultants, and accountants to arrange their tax affaires to avoid tax.”

While Australians face a cost-of-living crisis, billionaires have been raking it in. One report said that 897 self-managed super funds produced $1 million or more in income.

We now have “more wealth in the hands of 47 people than around 7.7 million Australians,” – just absurd.

And the wealth of:

“… the three wealthiest Australians, Gina Rinehart, Andrew Forrest and Harry Triguboff, has more than doubled since 2020 at a staggering $1.5 million per hour.”

That inequality of such magnitude should exist in a wealthy country like Australia should open our thinking toward a wealth tax.

SOS Australia rightly points out that:

“… the rest of the community bears the “cost of these tax concessions. It siphons off revenue that would be better used to fund schools, TAFE and universities, as well as other services such as health care, mental health, public housing, unemployment benefits and so on. As the economists Emmanuel Saez and Gabriel Zucman have observed, tax avoidance is ‘the triumph of injustice.”

They add that:

“To compound the injustice, the wealthiest families in Australia also benefit from over $1 billion a year in government funding for the elite private schools they send their kids to. Figures published on My School show that 126 of the wealthiest schools in Australia received $1.25 billion in government funding in 2020. Not only do the rich avoid paying taxes, but they get massive subsidies from the taxes paid by the rest of the community. The sheer scale of the avarice is gobsmacking.”

The Australia Institute also points out that tax concessions for super items “such as medical benefits are $31.3 billion, and assistance to the states for hospitals is $26.6 billion.”

You have to wonder how individuals accumulate large sums in superannuation while receiving such generous tax benefits, not to mention negative gearing, franking credits, and CGT (capital gains) discounts.

When you stop to consider it, the situation is quite scandalous. How did we get here? Is it the result of consecutive conservative governments being too generous while in power? Or is it due to the Labor government’s reluctance to take action? Once you’ve given something, it’s tough to take it back.

I wanted to understand why significant wealth inequality exists in our society. I wondered why both conservative and left-leaning governments tend to reward those who already have a lot of money rather than support those with less. It seems counterintuitive that this pattern persists across different political ideologies.

A conservative philosophy might suggest they should, but it doesn’t say it should be unfair. Conversely, Labor philosophy unequivocally supports the less well-off.

I typed into my search engine, “Why do the rich in Australia receive so many tax breaks?” Google provided a multitude of headlines to peruse.

As I wrote this, news hit the airwaves that the stage three tax alterations would advance more equitably. The Opposition is now up in arms, of course, but logic has won over politics. They will shout broken promises, but Labor can hardly go against its philosophy and still maintain respect with its supporters.

The Australian started its salvo with six stories on its front page about the tax cuts the day after the announcement – none with equality in mind.

Distinguishing a change of mind from a broken promise is often precarious, particularly in politics. It takes courage to change your mind for the greater good.

Another article I read was by Aimee Picchi, from December 17, 2020, for MoneyWatch. Although it wasn’t Australian and a little dated, it contained a thread to what I sought. Picchi wrote that:

“The new paper, by David Hope of the London School of Economics and Julian Limberg of King’s College London, examines 18 developed countries – from Australia to the United States – over 50 years from 1965 to 2015. The study compared countries that passed tax cuts in a specific year, such as the U.S. in 1982 when President Ronald Reagan slashed taxes for the wealthy, with those that didn’t, and then examined their economic outcomes.”

The analysis discovered one significant change:

“The incomes of the rich grew much faster in countries such as the USA, where tax rates were lowered, but instead of trickling down to the middle class, the tax cuts for the rich accomplished much more. Reagan inadvertently or deliberately helped the rich become more wealthy and exacerbated income inequality.”

Although the report doesn’t cover the period of Trump’s Presidency, his tax cuts lifted the ultra-rich’s fortunes even further.

A piece by The Guardian’s Stephanie Convery from 2023 tells us that the:

“Australian data showed that a wealth tax of just 2% on the country’s millionaires with wealth over $7m, 3% on those with wealth over $67m, and 5% on billionaires would raise $29.1bn annually, enough to increase income support payments to the Henderson poverty line of $88 a day for 1.44 million people.”

We inhabit a system with flaws where the principles of capitalism do not guarantee an equitable distribution of economic resources. This leads to a small group of privileged individuals accumulating enormous wealth while most people grapple with poverty in some shape or form.

Tax reform is necessary to generate additional revenue for the government, which can then be used to reduce poverty and improve human services.

We need tax reform to help those struggling with poverty and improve access to essential human services. By generating additional government revenue, we can work towards creating a more compassionate society that supports and cares for all of its citizens.

My last Google search was surprising. I found it hard to believe that more than 250 ultra-wealthy individuals were urging politicians to increase their taxes. It happened at the World Economic Forum in Davos on January 15-19, 2024.

“Our request is simple: we ask you to tax us, the very richest in society,” the wealthy people said in an open letter to world leaders. “This will not fundamentally alter our standard of living, deprive our children, or harm our nation’s economic growth. But it will turn extreme and unproductive private wealth into an investment for our common democratic future.”

Like I said: I was surprised.

My thought for the day

Is it feasible for incredibly wealthy individuals with many advantages to comprehend what it truly means to be in poverty? It’s difficult to say for sure, but some of them may have some understanding of the experience.

 

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Israel’s argument at The Hague: We are Incapable of Genocide

Israel’s relationship with the United Nations, international institutions and international law has at times bristled with suspicion and blatant hostility. In a famous cabinet meeting in 1955, Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion famously knocked back the suggestion that the United Nations 1947 plan for partitioning Palestine had been instrumental in creating the State of Israel. “No, no, no!” he roared in demur. “Only the daring of the Jews created the state, and not any oom-shmoom resolution.”

In the shadow of the Holocaust, justifications for violence against foes mushroom multiply. Given that international law, notably in war, entails restraint and limits on the use of force, doctrines have been selectively pruned and shaped, landscaped to suit the needs of the Jewish state. When the strictures of convention have been ignored, the reasoning is clipped for consistency: defenders of international law and its institutions have been either missing in the discussion or subservient to Israel’s enemies. They were nowhere to be seen, for instance, when Egypt’s Gamal Abdel Nasser was preparing for war in the spring of 1967. Israel’s tenaciously talented statesman, Abba Eban, reflected in his autobiography about the weakness of the UN in withdrawing troops from the Sinai when pressured by Nasser to do so. It “destroyed the most central hopes and expectations on which we had relied on withdrawing from Sinai.”

These steely attitudes have seen international convention and practice, in the Israeli context, treated less as Dickensian ass as protean instruments, useful to deploy when convenient, best modified or ignored when nationally inconvenient. This is most evident regarding the Israel-Hamas war, which is now into its third month. Here, Israeli authorities are resolute in their calls that Islamic terrorism is the enemy, that its destruction is fundamental for civilisation, and that crushing measures are entirely proportionate. Palestinian civilian deaths might be regrettable but all routes of blame lead to Hamas and its resort to human shields.

These arguments have failed to convince a growing number of countries. One of them is South Africa. On December 29, the Republic filed an application in the International Court of Justice alleging “violations by Israel regarding the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide […] in relation to Palestinians in the Gaza Strip.” Various “acts and omissions” by the Israeli government were alleged to be “genocidal in character, as they are committed with the requisite specific intent … to destroy the Palestinians in Gaza as part of the broader Palestinian national, racial and ethnical group.” What Pretoria is seeking is both a review of the merits of the case and the imposition of provisional measures that would essentially modify, if not halt, Israel’s Gaza operation.

Prior to its arguments made before the 15-judge panel on January 12, Israel rejected “with contempt the blood libel by South Africa in its application to the International Court of Justice (ICJ).” The Israeli Foreign Ministry went so far as to suggest that the court was being exploited, while South Africa was, in essence, “collaborating with a terror group that calls for the destruction of Israel.”

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, with demagogic rage, claimed that his country had witnessed “an upside-down world. Israel is accused of genocide while it is fighting against genocide.” The country was battling “murderous terrorists who carried out crimes against humanity.” Government spokesman Eylon Levy tried to make it all a matter of Hamas, nothing more, nothing less. “We have been clear in word and in deed that we are targeting the October 7th monsters and are innovating ways to uphold international law.”

In that innovation lies the problem. Whatever is meant by such statements as those of Israel Defence Forces spokesman, Rear Adm. Daniel Hagari, that “Our war is against Hamas, not against the people of Gaza”, the catastrophic civilian death toll, destruction, displacement and starvation would suggest the contrary. Innovation in war often entails carefree slaughter with a clear conscience.

On another level, the Israeli argument is more nuanced, going to the difficulties of proving genocidal intent. Amichai Cohen of Israel’s Ono Academic College and senior fellow at the Israel Democracy Institute admits that comments from right-wing Israeli ministers calling for the “emigration” of Palestinians from Gaza were not helpful. (They were certainly helpful to Pretoria’s case.) But he insists that the South African argument is based on “classic cherry-picking.” Cohen should know better than resort to the damnably obvious: all legal cases are, by definition, exercises of picking the finest cherries in the orchard.

The Israeli defence team’s oral submissions to the ICJ maintained a distinct air of unreality. Tal Becker, as legal advisor to the Israeli Foreign Ministry, tried to move judicial opinion in his address by drawing upon the man who minted genocide as a term of international law, Raphael Lemkin. Invariably, it was Becker’s purpose to again return to the Holocaust as “unspeakable” and uniquely linked to the fate of the Jews, implying that Jews would surely be incapable of committing those same acts. But here was South Africa, raining on the sacred flame, invoking “this term in the context of Israel’s conduct in a war it did not start and did not want. A war in which Israel is defending itself against Hamas, Palestinian Islamic Jihad and other terrorist organizations whose brutality knows no bounds.” Israel, pure; Israel vulnerable; Israel under attack.

In yet another jurisprudential innovation, Becker insisted that the Genocide Convention was not connected in any way to “address the brutal impact of intensive hostilities on the civilian population, even when the use of force raises ‘very serious issues of international law’ and involves ‘enormous suffering’ and ‘continuing loss of life’.” The Convention, rather, was meant “to address a malevolent crime of the most exceptional severity.”

The view is reiterated by another lawyer representing Israel. “The inevitable fatalities and human suffering of any conflict,” submitted Christopher Staker, “is not of itself a pattern of conduct that plausibly shows genocidal intent.” Butcheries on a massive scale would not, in of themselves, suggest such the requisite mental state to exterminate a race, ethnic or religious group.

As for South Africa’s insistence that provisional measures be granted, Staker was unwavering in repeating the familiar talking points. They “would stop Israel defending its citizens, more citizens could be attacked, raped and tortured [by Hamas], and provisional measures would prevent Israel doing anything.”

Legal tricks and casuistry were something of a blooming phenomenon in Israel’s submissions. South Africa had, according to Becker, submitted “a profoundly distorted factual and legal picture. The entirety of its case hinges on deliberately curated, decontextualised, and manipulative description of the reality of current hostilities.” Happy to also do a little bit of decontextualising, curating and manipulating himself, Becker trotted out the idea that, in accusing Israeli’s war methods as being genocidal, Pretoria was “delegitimizing Israel’s 75-year existence in its opening presentation.” It entailed erasing Jewish history and excising “any Palestinian agency or responsibility.” Such a ploy has been Israel’s rhetorical weapon for decades: all those who dare judge the state’s actions in a bad light also judge the legitimacy of the Jewish state to exist.

Malcom Shaw, a figure known for his expertise in the thorny realm of territorial disputes, did his little bit of legal curation. He took particular issue with South Africa’s use of history in suggesting that Israel had engaged in a prolonged dispossession and oppression of the Palestinians, effectively a remorseless, relentless Nakba lasting 75 years. The submission was curious for lacking any mooring in history, a fatal error to make when considering the Israel-Palestinian issue. It’s also palpably inaccurate, given the dozens of statements made by Israeli politicians over the decades acknowledging the brutal, ruthless and dispossessing tendencies of their own country. But legal practitioners love confines and walled off applications. The only thing that mattered here, argued Shaw, was the attack of October 7 by Hamas, a sole act of barbarity that could be read in terrifying isolation. That, he claimed was “the real genocide in this situation.”

Having tossed around his own idea about the real genocidaires (never Israel, remember?), Shaw then appealed to the sanctity of the term genocide, one so singular it would be inapplicable in most instances. Conflicts could still be brutal, and not be genocidal. “If claims of genocide were to become the common currency of our conflict … the essence of this crime would be diluted and lost.” Woe to the diluters.

Gilad Noam, in closing Israel’s defence, rejected the characterisation of Israel by South Africa as a lawless entity that regarded “itself as beyond and above the law”, whose population had become infatuated “with destroying an entire population.” In a sense, Noam makes a revealing point. What makes Israel’s conduct remarkable is that its government claims to operate within a world of laws, a form of hyper-legalisation just as horrible as a world without laws.

Ironically enough, the Lemkin Institute for Genocide Prevention has been furiously pressing the International Criminal Court to indict Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu for the crime of genocide, the siege and bombardment of Gaza “and the many expressions of genocidal intent, especially in his deleted tweet from 10/17/2023.” The tweet (or post) in question crudely and murderously declared that, “This is a struggle between the children of light and the children of darkness, between humanity and the law of the jungle.” If that does not reveal intent, little else will.

 

 

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