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AUSMIN and Assange: The Great Vassal Smackdown

It was there for all to see. Embarrassing, cloying, and bound make you cough up the remnants of your summit lunch, US Secretary of State Antony Blinken and Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin III stopped by one of the vassal states to make sure that the meal and military service was orderly, the troops well behaved, and the weapons working as they should. On the occasion of 2023 AUSMIN meetings, the questions asked were mild and generally unprovocative; answers were naturally tailored.

Seeing that Australia is now rapidly moving into the US orbit of client status – its minerals will be designated a US domestic resource in due course – and given that its land, sea and air are to be more available than ever for the US armed forces, nuclear and conventional, nothing will interrupt this inexorable extinguishing of sovereignty.

One vestige of Australian sovereignty might have evinced itself, notably in how Canberra might push for the release, or at the very least better terms, for the Australian national and founder of WikiLeaks, Julian Assange. The publisher faces 18 counts, all but one of them pertaining to the Espionage Act of 1917, an archaic, wartime act with a dark record of punishing free speech and contrarians. The Albanese government, eschewing “the hailer” approach in favour of “quiet diplomacy” and not offending Washington, has conspicuously failed to make any impression.

In April, an open letter to the US Attorney General, Merrick Garland, featuring 48 Australian MPs and Senators, including 13 from the governing Labor Party, argued that the Assange prosecution “would set a dangerous precedent for all global citizens, journalists, publishers, media organizations and the freedom of the press. It would also be needlessly damaging for the US as a world leader on freedom of expression and the rule of law.”

Despite such concerns bubbling away in Parliament, Australia’s Foreign Minister Penny Wong was in no danger of upsetting their guests. “[W]e have made clear our view that Mr Assange’s case has dragged for too long, and our desire it be brought to a conclusion, and we’ve said that publicly and you would anticipate that that reflects also the positive we articulate in private.” But, as ever, “there are limits until Mr. Assange’s legal processes have concluded.” The assumption, laid bare, is that Australia will only push for terms once the US secures its treasured quarry.

Blinken parroted staged, withered lines, politely dismissing Wong’s statements while pouring acid on the Assange plea. “I really do understand and certainly confirm what Penny said about the fact that this matter was raised with us, as it has been in the past, and I understand the sensitivities, I understand the concerns and view of Australians.” He thought it “important”, as if it mattered “that our friends here understand our concerns about this matter.”

Those friends were made to understand that matter in no uncertain terms. Assange had been “charged with very serious criminal conduct in the United States in connection with his alleged role in one of the largest compromises of classified information in the history of our country. The actions that he has alleged to have committed risked very serious harm to our national security, to the benefit of our adversaries, and put named sources at grave risk – grave risk – of physical harm, and grave risk of detention.”

Such excremental, false reasoning was galling, and went unchallenged by the all too pliant Senator Wong and the Australian Defence Minister, Richard Marles. This, despite the cool findings by Blinken’s own colleagues at the Pentagon that the WikiLeaks disclosures never posed a risk to any valued source in the service of the US imperium, and the fact that other outlets have also published these purportedly “named sources” without having their collars fingered by the US Department of Justice. The double standard is gold in Washington.

The same babbling nonsense was evident during the extradition trial proceedings of Assange that were held at London’s Central Criminal Court in 2020. There, the prosecution, representing a number of clumsy, clownish and impressively ignorant representatives from Freedom Land, proved unable to produce a single instance of actual compromise or harm to a single informant of the US imperium. They also showed, with idiotic facility, an ignorance of the court martial that the US military had subjected Chelsea Manning to when she faced charges for revealing classified national security information to WikiLeaks.

Wong, as part of her buttoned-up brief dictated by Washington’s suits, either did not know nor care to correct Blinken who, for all we know, is equally ignorant of his brief on the subject. If the prosecutors in London in 2020 had no idea, why should the US secretary of state, let alone the Australian foreign minister?

As a terrible omen for the Australians, four defence personnel seem to have perished in waters near Hamilton Island through an accident with their MRH-90 Taipan helicopter as part of the Talisman Sabre war games. The US overlords were paternal and benevolent; their Australian counterparts were grateful for the interest. Blinken soppily suggested how the sacrifice was appreciated. “They have been on our minds throughout today; they remain very much on our minds right now.” But the message was clear: Australia, you are now less a state than a protectorate, territory to exploit, a resource basket to appropriate. Why not just make it official?

 

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Lazy language damages our present and risks our future

Labels have power. They shape the way we know the world. They allow people to see actions with greater clarity or distort our understanding to make things unrecognisable.

When war involves “collateral damage,” the label strips the incident of shredded flesh and wailing orphans. By labelling the near elimination of abortion access a Pro Life position, conservatives elide the dramatic and deadly impact on lives caused by the denial of reproductive justice. Calling it a “state sanctioned forced birth” position recasts the nature of women’s experience in Republican America.

When Scott Morrison demanded that refugees exercising their legal right to seek asylum were relabelled “illegal maritime arrivals,” it became easier to persecute people fleeing hell without public horror.

By depicting welfare recipients as fraudsters, Alan Tudge escalated the war on those who experience periods of struggle. And Robodebt showed how labels can even hide things from us. The Saturday Paper’s special podcast series “Inside Robodebt” illustrates that one of the key factors delayed recognition of the scandal emerging is that the illegal debt averaging process didn’t have a name.

“Inside Robodebt” also highlights that it was not journalists, by and large, who detected the program’s criminal disgrace. It was a loose group including a lecturer and Twitter commentators. No wonder the Coalition’s friends love to apply disparaging labels to their Twitter critics, conflating commentators’ valid critiques of a scandalous decade with the troll army’s vile bullying.

Right wing politicians and commentators have an additional label in their arsenal at the moment to discredit every person or idea that doesn’t suit their agenda. By calling something “woke,” it ceases to be a matter of morality or compassion or sound policy or good manners. It becomes something – or someone – to be derided and despised.

We deny ourselves the ability to choose our present circumstances and shape our future if we allow the lazy application of labels.

Mainstream journalists were supine in their acceptance and repetition of the politicians’ disgraceful mislabelling of vulnerable people during the Coalition decade. The public absorbed the idea that people could be “illegal,” that fake debts made ordinary Australians into criminals. Sometimes journalists were rushed and forced to fill pages with tweaked press releases. Sometimes, however, journalists were cynics ensuring access and front page leaks by playing the politicians’ games.

The most likely news source to counter the government’s narrative was the ABC, but that has been abused largely into complicity. Any ABC efforts to challenge and expose malfeasance continues to be discredited by the wholesale framing of the organisation as “woke” or “socialist” by the Coalition and the corporate media. Any exposé coming from it is thus made irrelevant.

Some on the Labor side had accepted the Coalition’s labels as valid and echoed the framing. Others gave up trying to frame the debate more accurately and tried to fight the battle along lines drawn up by the power players of the narrative.

Journalists have been the gatekeepers by which we understand the civic space. Their lazy acceptance of labels helps perpetuate distortions that damage individuals and society. We need journalists who understand that they share the blame with politicians and public servants for making the Coalition’s decade of shame possible. Without critical thinking skills, journalists betray the muckraking and investigative stars of their profession’s history; otherwise they can be much better paid as the spin doctors many seem content to ape.

The news media has struggled to describe the events of this era. Part of the problem is that they fail to appreciate the degree to which the Right is radicalising, bogged down in normalcy bias. Part is that the news sector bends excessively towards being balanced between positions: when the Right’s position is so extreme that to describe it aptly sounds like a judgement, the decision-makers struggle to cope with the new reality.

We need to understand our political labels at a moment when the Right is embracing ever more oppressive political ploys internationally. Robert Reich noted that American newspapers are finally beginning to label presidential contender Trump’s messaging as “authoritarian.” He spells out clearly, however, that it is technically better understood as “fascist.” Trump’s Republican Party is a ghoulish parody of its grand old past.

None of this is accidental. The cynical Americanised ultra free market Right does not believe in government’s role. It is funded and galvanised by the needs of the plutocrats: low tax and ever fewer protections – labelled “regulation”- to stifle their ultimate freedom to exploit. The same kind of cynicism has driven the Right in America to fight, since the Civil Rights era, to reverse the progress that withdrew the barriers to equality for persecuted and disempowered groups. The strategies to undo America’s democratic structures have been in construction at least as long.

Much of the plutocrats’ Dark Money has gone to strategists and spin doctors. The same ethics-free intent to achieve their goals at any cost pervades their political representatives. Robodebt’s egregious fraud perpetrated against citizens is the most striking Australian example; media advisor Rachelle Miller has revealed Alan Tudge’s spin strategies. When Scott Morrison took over immigration, he employed 66 spin doctors compared to PM Tony Abbott’s 39: “on water” secrecy and propaganda was costing us $8 million a year.

Journalists have been far too ready not to question their role in spreading this strategic toxic spin. In fact, they use that spread as the basis for further stories about artificial “controversies.”

Structural politics is illustrative of these orchestrated drifts. It only takes a brief look at the names of Australia’s two major parties to see how political labels can ossify, representing the history rather than the ideology of a party. Labor does not represent the labour movement that was its original constituency. The Liberal Party is not liberal, but neither is it conservative. The Liberal politicians who merited those labels have largely left in disgust at what the party has become. The rump is a radicalised Right mimicking the extremists dominating the Republican Party.

Parties represent a loose coalition of ideologies and goals aiming to contain personalities, priorities and the tactical decisions that might achieve them. Since John Howard’s era, Australians have seen how much these can change a party. Dragging the label “conservative” with them, the Right now depicts centrist policy as “woke” and “socialist” in a long Americanisation of the more worker-friendly Australian social contract.

The linear continuum by which we have attempted to understand our politics – from Left to Right – has always been an artificial construct too.

The rightly contested horseshoe theory shallowly suggests that the political extremes of communism and fascism are closer to each other than to liberalism. Kathleen Belew replaces that with the metaphor of a circle. She described the “crunchy to alt-right pipeline” where, since the 1970s, hippies and white supremacists bonded over such anti-government fights as the fluoridation of water.

The Red Brown alliance is a late soviet description of a much older phenomenon – the rough cooperation of communists and fascists in joint, nationalist loathing of liberal elites. Third Reich Nazis were often both “green” and yoga lovers.

These connections do not reflect true sympathies, but they do underscore the fact that we all have different concerns activated at key moments.

In the era of permacrisis, however, even the old approximations are crumbling.

Over covid, the far right exercised its usual cunning in coopting the conspiracy theorists emerging around an internet joke: QAnon. It also drew on the deep resentment that came from policies poorly explained or executed that harmed the precariat while the billionaires reaped massive profit. Belew’s “crunchies” (hippies) were absorbed over again into the White supremacist sphere in their antagonism to Big Pharma and a fear of government’s oppressive tendencies. In Australia, our Pastel QAnon yoga influencers and antivaxx mums joined the far right in their Convoy to Canberra in a complicated conspiracy smoothie.

QAnon has now seeped into the radicalised right space intermingled with Pentecostal cultish beliefs. These underly the application of the term “groomer” to anyone defending LGBTQIA+ existence on social media as a side note to the exterminationist rhetoric.

Online, influential men considered to be of the Left drifted towards the Right, often driven by resentment towards the age of consequences, more commonly labelled Cancel Culture. Their preeminence as mostly White men has been challenged by the demands that they share the microphone with minority voices. Glenn Greenwald and Matt Taibbi, for example, suddenly started finding a better home on Fox News than subversive left-leaning platforms. The dirtbag Left and the Alt-Right (a label meant to elide the movement’s white supremacist core) share an ironic and provocative aesthetic that has helped draw these figures together in shared disdain for the prissy judgement of the bougie “woke.”

Younger American “conservatives” – many of them on the lucrative gravy train where Dark Money donations fund their early career – have turned old Soviet Nazbol politics into the new Nat Con movement. National Conservatism feigns support for the battler in a way that looks vaguely leftist while continuing the persecution of the most vulnerable combined with a “traditionalist” persecution of minorities for “patriotic” redemption. These elite youth frame an anti-American “elite” as an existential threat: their prestigious university education is not the same as the university education that they define as “woke” poison.

Presidential contender Robert Kennedy uses similar faux-egalitarian talking points to signal himself as meriting the destiny of a “Kennedy” while actively working with his tech bro plutocrat funders and spreading disinformation, labelling it “free speech.” He has now said that the Covid19 virus was ethnically targeted to protect Jewish and Chinese people.

These shifts in allegiance make pinning down “Left” or “Right,” “centrist” or “conservative” outrageously challenging. Journalists of integrity can be forgiven for missing the seriousness of the trajectory.

Such mislabelling normalises the dragging of “conservative” politics ever further towards fascist politics; it serves the far right by presenting their grotesque policies as a facet of business as usual rather than a radical change. Ignoring the trajectory outside their information bubble meant that most Americans missed the indicators leading to insurrectionist attack on the Capitol on 6 Jan 2021. Normalcy bias means journalists continued to quote Republican politicians reframing it as a normal tourist visit.

Climate scientists have struggled for decades to frame their messaging of the looming – potentially existential – crisis. Scientific communication that always conveys the possibility of new discoveries has been exaggerated to imply doubt about predictions. The profession of creating doubt to prevent regulation of industry was deployed by tobacco sector: the same strategies, and even the same people, translated into the fossil fuel sector’s destruction of our sense of a shared knowledge base.

At the end of the Obama era, those watching knew how fragile America’s democratic structure was, but few imagined the brink towards which the Republican Party could drive their nation in a single presidential term. It took one shameless conman to achieve it.

Australia’s Coalition is similarly disdainful of their opposition’s right to govern. They too showed that they had ceased to believe in the validity of the democratic contest over the last decade.

Australia is at risk of the Coalition finding that charismatic conman who will allow it to destroy the reign of the despised “woke” urban electorates. Just as so much of their agenda and strategy is defined by the Republican machine, their policy will likely come after the rights and freedoms that their mentors are destroying in the USA.

If journalists can’t label the moment in its true seriousness, we can’t expect the distracted public to recognise it.

 

A much shorter version of this was published in Pearls and Irritations as An American system of “state sanctioned forced births”?

 

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A Robodebt response from a leader full of loathing

So incensed was I with the Leader of the Opposition’s response to the Royal Commissions report into the Robodebt Scheme that for a brief moment, I actually felt sorry for him.

However, in an equally brief deliberation, I realised that it was us, the people, that my sorrow was better directed. We deserved more than what Peter Dutton gave us. The Leader of the Opposition’s standing is fundamental to our democracy because he leads the alternative Government and therefore represents its philosophy and policies.

But alas, when responding to matters of importance, he attacks with all the ferocity of an angry Abbott or a lying Morrison. Let me explain his reaction to the Commission’s report in four instances.

1 “When the problems were brought to the government’s attention at the time, the program was stopped,” Mr Dutton told reporters.

FACT: The Commissioner identified the many times the scheme was found to be illegal and was never stopped. So that was a lie.

2 “I think the people of Fadden are much smarter than that – they’ve seen the personal smears against (Liberal candidate) Cameron Caldwell, they’ve seen the political advantage in the timing of the release of this report…

They’re not stupid. They can see that.”

FACT: The Government instigated the Commission, and its delivery date was decided before a bye-election became necessary. The Electoral Commission, not the Government, decided on that date, so any collusion was impossible. A lie.

3 “I caution the glee of the Prime Minister and Bill Shorten at the moment. They’ve sought to politicise this issue from day one.”

Glee means merriment, gaiety, joy, delight or cheer. Albanese and Shorten couldn’t be accused of being gleeful in all the media coverage I read or saw. Another one of your lies.

4 Dutton also accused the PM of trying to “unseal” the secret chapter of the report for political gain.

“Albanese has said he is seeking advice about whether the confidential, sealed chapter from the Commission’s report, which details these referrals, can eventually be released after further actions against named individuals and legal appeals are exhausted.”

Oops. Another lie.

Albanese can’t name anyone. He only went as far as the report would allow. Bill Shorten has also sought legal advice on revealing the names. There is no conspiracy to open any envelope.

The dilemma here is that, on the one hand, the public, after spending millions on a Royal Commission, deserves to know who was responsible for the gross mishandling of a scheme that oversaw many deaths.

On the other hand, those accused deserve the right to be innocent until proven guilty.

One cannot dispute (although Dutton doubtlessly will) that this Royal Commission was conducted with the highest ethics and integrity by Catherine Holmes, but at this point, it needs completeness. There has to be just transparency.

Heads of departments in the public service are empowered to take immediate action against public servants who are found to have acted unlawfully or incompetently, meaning that Kathryn Campbell and Renée Leon will lose their positions. So, might others. The Commissioner found adverse findings against 7 public servants.

Just who the politicians are is still unknown. Suppose there is no accountability or consequences, and the culprits remain unknown for what has transpired. If they remain unaccountable and unknown, the Commission will have achieved little other than telling our politicians they are free to continue their deception and corruption.

Of course, we have yet to determine how many names are in the sealed section of the report, but I imagine names like: Scott Morrison. Kathryn Campbell. Alan Tudge. Stuart Robert. Christian Porter. Annette Musolino. Serena Wilson. Jonathan Hutson. Mark Withnell. Paul McBride. Emma Kate McGuirk. Karen Harfield. Jason McNamara and Craig Storen would be shaking in their shoes right now.

There may be others, of course. All that can be said of these individuals other than the damming commentary in the report itself is that they are of a category of humanity that most of us are unfamiliar with.

Of the former Prime Minister, the Commission found that:

“It was Morrison’s pathological incuriosity that allowed cabinet to be deceived.

“Mr Morrison allowed Cabinet to be misled because he did not make that obvious inquiry,” Holmes’s report says. “He took the proposal to Cabinet without necessary information.”

Of Minister Alan Tudge:

“Tudge, Holmes found, was motivated by a desire to “save face” both personally and on behalf of the Government. He wanted to “minimise public embarrassment” after he had publicly trumpeted the new era of debt compliance when he became minister the year before.”

“As a minister, Mr Tudge was invested with a significant amount of public power,” the report says.

“Mr Tudge’s use of information about social security recipients in the media to distract from and discourage commentary about the scheme’s problems represented an abuse of that power.”

Of Minister Christian Porter:

“Mr Porter could not rationally have been satisfied of the legality of the Scheme on the basis of his general knowledge of the [new policy proposal] process, when he did not have actual knowledge of the content of the NPP, and had no idea whether it had said anything about the practice of income averaging,”

Minister Stuart Robert:

When Stuart Robert was appointed minister for Government Services, he was briefed on a Federal Court of Australia case concerning a Robodebt victim in which the Australian Government Solicitor had provided draft legal advice warning the scheme was almost certainly not lawful.

However, Robert:

“… denies being briefed on this advice in June 2019, but the Royal Commission does not believe him. This poses a significant problem for the former minister because it was another five months before the opinion of the solicitor-general was sought. This was the definitive, scheme-killing legal advice.”

Why was there such a long wait? Officials argue it was simply a long process:

“In the Commission’s view, none of this justifies the five-month delay in preparing and delivering the brief.”

Further, Commissioner Catherine Holmes said also that:

“… elements “appear to exist” of the little-known tort of misfeasance in public office, in detailed findings that targeted various former Coalition ministers over a scheme she described as wracked by collusion and dishonesty.”

The term misfeasance means that the victims could sue the Ministers directly.

There needs to be a form of obligation on the agencies receiving the referrals for potential civil action or criminal prosecution, the Australian federal police and the National Anti-Corruption Commission to take further action. As it stands, they need do nothing if they so desire. Therefore, I come down on the side of revealing the names of those ministers referred. They would still have the right to defend themselves.

I agree with Anthony Whealy, a former NSW Supreme Court judge and chair of The Centre for Public Integrity, who said:

“It’s better, I think, in the public interest that those people be named, and we know who they’re being referred to because I think that’s what the public is entitled to know.”

“Certainly, it’s a job unfinished … because the commission has the power to make referrals to various disciplinary or criminal agencies, and until we know exactly what it’s done in that regard, we don’t see the finished product, and therefore, I think, you know, there’s a certain air of dissatisfaction with that aspect of the outcome.”

Dutton’s response showed not the slightest concern for the victims of this corrupt and wicked scheme. He apologised to them, but it was an empty graceless apology that lacked empathy and emotion. 500 thousand Australians were affected, and 2000 committed suicide. By saying the things, he did, he put on display all the reasons why he would never make an Australian Prime Minister.

He is from the Abbott/Morrison mould that tried so hard to wreck our democracy.

 

Let me remind you of our immediate political past under conservative rule

Never in Australian politics did the Australian public so unintelligently elect a series of right-wing governments over a decade that were rotten, to the core, infected with hatred for the less well-off but happy with the burden they carried. So ignorant of its own incompetence. So willing to break laws and trash convention. So utterly corrupted with lying that they sometimes knew not when or why they were telling them.

So brutal toward those seeking a better life on the waves of empathy. So unsympathetic to those domestically in need of help. So full of ministers who didn’t care about the corruption that engulfed them. So unendowed with leadership were they that every decision passed through cabinet uncaringly and unquestioned.

That so many remnants of that era still exist in the ranks of conservatives must surely remind our citizens of how badly they governed. A sobering thought when the current Leader sees nothing wrong with their ideology.

My thought for the day

The previous Government’s performance in office was like a daily shower of offensiveness raining down on society.

PS: Commissioner Catherine Holmes said:

“It may be that the evidence in this royal Commission has gone some way to changing public perceptions. But largely, those attitudes are set by politicians, who need to abandon for good (in every sense) the narrative of taxpayer versus welfare recipient.”

 

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Don’t you worry about that

Former Queensland Premier Johannes Bjelke-Petersen frequently used the expression ‘don’t you worry about that’ when he either didn’t want to answer the question, or knew the the question would suggest additional requests for information.

Bjelke-Petersen’s National Party oversaw a gradual erosion of civi rights and equality in Queensland. Bjelke-Petersen was portrayed as a strong leader that got things done. It was claimed that Bjelke-Petersen used the number of cranes constructing high-rise buildings in Brisbane as an indicator of the state’s progress. There was also considerable spending on infrastructure to service coal mines, such as new coal haul railways, better roads in coal mining areas and so on. Part of the National Party’s sales pitch at the time was that the same amount of economic activity would not be generated by the Opposition ALP. A debatable claim at best, as the world was beating a path to Australia’s door for coal and other minerals in the era and unlike a lot of other products, you can’t move mineral extraction to a country that offers a cheaper cost of production unless they also have the same minerals.

Meanwhile services to the Queensland public were lagging the rest of Australia. Health, education and other services that should be supplied by governments were starved of funding with Bjelke-Petersen priding himself on running the ‘low tax’ state. Unfortunately, the effects of the lack of investment are still being experienced today. A considerable number of Queensland voters didn’t worry about it at the time, figuring “Joh” would do the right thing by them and keep the ‘unruly’ unions and rabble-rousers that questioned the leadership at bay. The National Party government was ‘tough’ on unions and (it turned out selected) crime, labelling those that opposed the government as discontents and criminals, banning street marches and protest activity. The marketing was assisted by a generally compliant local media.

In the late 1980s the Fitzgerald Enquiry demonstrated that corruption had been evident at the highest levels of the Queensland Government. Subsequently, there were a number of referrals to the criminal justice system. A number of then government Ministers and the then Police Commissioner all served periods of time in jail. Bjelke-Petersen was personally never found guilty of corruption as the court case was abandoned due to the malfeasance of a juror. A second trial was considered but later aborted due to Bjelke-Petersen’s age and deteriorating health.

When you think about it, the Abbott, Turnbull, Morrison Coalition government used a lot of the same playbook as Bjelke-Petersen and other similar regimes around the world. In time, will the Robodebt Royal Commission have the same aura as the Fitzgerald Enquiry’s report in 1989?

Both governments were popularist paternal governments using a compliant media to reinforce the sales pitch that if you weren’t with the government, you were somewhat lacking in intelligence and really didn’t deserve a say. Bjelke-Petersen turned on ‘socialists’ and ‘unions’ as the necessary dangerous influences in his script of being a protector of morals and economic progress of society. Morrison suggested we should call him ‘Scomo’ and turned on fraudulent activities by ‘welfare cheats’ and refugees to present the myth he was keeping Australia safe for ‘god fearing Christians’ like himself. Like Bjelke-Petersen, Morrison also relied on a compliant media for support. According to the Robodebt Royal Commissioner Catherine Homes

“The evidence before the commission was that fraud in the welfare system was minuscule, but that is not the impression one would get from what ministers responsible for social security payments have said over the years,”

The recommendations for sanctions and criminal referrals in the Robodebt Royal Commission’s report is in the ‘sealed section’. It’s likely that as those named are brought to account for their impropriety, there will be sections of the media that will be quite happy to ‘name and shame’. It could be that a number of former Ministers and senior public servants – all of who should have known better – will end up serving time in prison.

The Fitzgerald Enquiry spawned the Criminal Justice Commission which is now known as the (Queensland) Crime and Corruption Commission. It is absolutely not co-incidental that Commissioner Holmes requested a 7-day extension so that matters could be referred to the Federal Government’s new National Anti-Corruption Commission.

While we don’t know for certain, there is no evidence to suggest that Albanese’s Federal Government will ignore the recommendations of the Robodebt Royal Commission. They will probably support efforts by law enforcement agencies and the National Anti-Corruption Commission to take action against those named in the ‘sealed section’. We do know that when the ALP won power in Queensland after the Fitzgerald Enquiry, Premier Wayne Goss (who’s Chief of Staff was Kevin Rudd) implemented the recommendations of the Fitzgerald Enquiry and allowed the authorities to press charges against those named in the Enquiry’s findings.

Like the Fitzgerald Enquiry, the Robodebt Royal Commission has caught the public’s attention. You would hope we all learn from recent experience. The next time a political leader invites us to call them a derivative of their first name, tells us not to worry about that and they will save us from some claimed endemic fraudulent or radical activity by some group of people that really doesn’t exist – it’s really the time to commence worrying. Those that forget their history are destined to repeat it.

 

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Robodebt – Morrison’s latest disaster

In August 2022 Peter Dutton was interviewed in Adelaide. In a wide ranging interview he stated, many times, that if a Royal Commission was set up to look into Robodebt, then Bill Shorten should be the first minister to appear.

Asked several times about Scott Morrison’s responsibility for the scheme he repeated his charge that Shorten, alongside Tanya Plibersek, had designed the scheme.

Clear differences have since been identified between the two iterations. In an AAP Factcheck, it was found that Labor’s scheme required the input of actual human staff in determining whether there was indeed a debt, and another crucial difference was the burden of proof was moved from the government to the welfare recipient.

Scale was another. When the system was automated, the number of referrals and debts raised rose from 20,000 a year, to 20,000 a week.

Before the Royal Commission was even begun Mr Dutton implied that the Royal Commission would be a sham, and it would turn into a tricky political game, in which Anthony Albanese would attempt to inflict revenge on his predecessor.

A strange observation, when we see the damage done to over a half-million Australians. Many of them, and many others who simply believe in good governance, would be savouring the prospect of the likes of Morrison, Tudge, Porter and Robert being brought to some form of justice, whatever that looks like.

What was the report’s outcome?

If we fast forward to July 2023 the report has been released. It has named several former Coalition ministers, and several department heads and senior public servants, as having failed in their duty to oversee the program, and to deliver a fair and reasonable service to the taxpayer.

Mr Dutton now seems to think that, although he has now apologised for the scheme on behalf of the former government, the Labor Party was enjoying the findings of the Royal Commission way too much. He described Bill Shorten as “gleeful”.

It seems he seriously underestimated the Royal Commissioner, who has earned herself a reputation as a direct and fluent communicator, with a tendency to call a spade a spade. She has delivered a report which is clearly her own work, and not ghost-written by Anthony Albanese.

Most damning was her finding that the program was unlawful, and that somewhere along the line senior public servants chose to evade their responsibilities to the parliament, apparently to pander to Scott Morrison’s desire for favourable results, and favourable press coverage.

When Marise Payne was giving evidence before the Royal Commission, she was asked who ultimately was responsible when mistakes were made in formulating public policy. She answered, “Responsibility is always borne by ministers.”

Morrison was the senior minister at the inception, and he presented the policy to cabinet. The only problem was that, through ignorance, wilful or not, or plain oversight, the question of legality had not been settled, and this led to the subsequent finding that the scheme was “unfair and unlawful.”

How have the former ministers behaved since the Royal Commission?

Christian Porter resigned from parliament, before the Royal Commission began. Alan Tudge has resigned from parliament, after his evidence was taken. Stuart Robert has resigned from parliament, after his evidence was taken.

Scott Morrison has remained in parliament. He has disputed the findings of the Royal Commission.

Alan Tudge and Stuart Robert have also disputed the findings. Considering the short attention span of the majority of Australians there is no guarantee that the outrage will continue for long.

Are there to be any legal consequences for those named?

It is unknown how many of the key figures have been referred for civil and or criminal charges. Those so named will inevitably face some sort of accounting for their failures, although it might end up only involving a slap on the wrist.

When the political class prosecutes its own, there is always a feeling that me-tooism will prove too strong for their blood. Today’s witch-hunt often runs out of steam, so do not be surprised if, in a couple of years, they collectively decide to call it all off.

The whole sorry mess has been labelled as “cruel and crude,” but we will only know the outcome when the legal process has ended. Remember, it is a classic case of us against them. Politicians have been shown to put their own interests first, and we all know that maintaining the rage is not their strong suit.

Our political culture is imbued with a crude and cruel mind-set. We need to treat those who need our help better. Those on welfare, refugees and the disabled are our fellow citizens. Politicians use these groups as straw men, set up to divert our attention away from their own malfeasance.

If all else fails, it was a pleasure to see the likes of Morrison, Tudge and Robert squirming on the witness stand. Perhaps that is the only satisfaction we will get.

 

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Who is Christian Porter’s sugar daddy? (part 1)

By guest columnist Tess Lawrence

Readers know that our guest columnist Tess Lawrence has the naughty habit of calling a spade a pickaxe, especially when excavating the toxic sewers of politics and bodily wastes left in the wake of certain politicians, in this case the erstwhile Attorney-General, Christian Porter who fancied himself a future prime minister.

Alas for him, and thankfully for us, the universe thought better of it.

Mr Very Ordinary Porter, devoid of the honorific ‘Honourable’ is now doing what so many ex-politicians do once they’ve nuanced their bloating pensions. What would that be you may ask? Why, using insider knowledge gained whilst AG to his greater benefit of course! Ergo, representing a notorious sanctioned Russian oligarch in Australian courts.

You wouldn’t read about it. And yet you shall. In this deep, deep dive series, Lawrence can’t help but wonder if it was the Ruski oligarch who poured those secret monies into the coffers of poligarch Porter’s blind trust to pay legal costs arising from his bungling attempt to sue the ABC for Defamation.

Read on, but only if you have the stomach for rancid nether regions of the body politic.

***

He may have skulked off the political stage, exit hard right. But there is unfinished business with this dude.

Who is Christian Porter’s Sugar Daddy-Or Sugar Mama?

Who was it who may have poured tens of thousands of rubles, bitcoin, Perth Mint gold bullion, baubles, bangles, bright shiny beads, jinga-linga, rupees, yuan, riyals, dollars, ooshies or whatever, into Mr Porter’s notorious ‘blind trust’ for legal costs sustained in his very public private defamation action against the ABC?

Maybe it was Satoshi Nakamoto and if it was, does that mean millions of bitcoin poured in? How would we of The Great Unwashed know? The thing about Porter’s blind trust is that justice is sometimes blind and Porter has proved he can’t be trusted.

Porter’s donor(s) dirty little secret invites speculation

If we are denied truth and transparency we are not only invited to speculate but as responsible citizens, should also agitate for the truth until Porter the Christian and those key actors of the former Scott Morrison Coalition government including Opposition leader Peter Dutton, are held accountable and the identity of the donor(s) exposed.

Silence makes us inadvertent collaborators in what, by implication, is being kept a dirty, little secret from we who ultimately pay the wages of politicians.

Maybe there was enough moolah left in the BT coffers to also pay for Porter’s failed appeal in the Federal Court against the dismissal of his high profile lawyer Sue Chrysanthou after legal action brought against him by high profile producer, former Independent candidate and whistleblower, Jo Dyer.

Jo Dyer loyal to Porter’s alleged rape victim who suicided

Importantly, Dyer remains a loyal advocate for a woman who took her own life; a woman who alleged that Porter raped her when they were both teenagers.

There’s this from an article, Court reveals dossier of alleged rape by Christian Porter by Max Mason in the Financial Review on June 25th, 2021:

“… Ms Dyer alleged a conflict of interest and potential use of confidential information after Ms Chrysanthou took part in a meeting in November last year with her and others, including defamation barrister Matthew Richardson and Mr Hooke.

… Ms Chrysanthou gave free advice to Ms Dyer on November 20 last year, and again on January 27 and 28 this year. The advice was in relation to an article published in The Australian after Ms Dyer appeared on Four Corners in November.

… The rape allegation against Mr Porter was not aired in this program…”

To be clear, Porter has always professed innocence of rape allegation

These much publicised legal cases were humiliating own goals for Porter. Bit of a shabby look innit for a then Attorney-General and wannabe prime minister?

But hey, these fails didn’t bother Oleg the Oligarch, Deripaska. When you’re taking on the Australian Government, who better to hire than a former federal AG; an insider and Morrison intimate who still keeps cabinet secrets hostage in his wallet? The ‘former politician’ labour hire industry is booming.

So what if Deripaska gave Porter the dosh?

But so what if Deripaska donated that money to Porter? It was always a matter of time before Porter would scurry from politics, despite earlier denials that he’d quit. Porter was already mostly self-inflicted damaged goods.

But what if that money was a sort of ‘down payment’ in exchange for favours ? What if an agreement was struck well before Porter quit, that he would represent Deripaska against the Australian Government and its laws? Only speculating. Only wot-iffing. We cannot say one way or t’other.

When did Deripaska and Porter first come into contact?

When did Deripaska and Porter first come into contact with each other; when Porter was Attorney-General? This matters.

Former Foreign Minister Payne sanctions Russian oligarchs

On March 14 last year, Payne issued a press release about new sanctions against Russian oligarchs, immediate family members and businesspeople, naming the likes of Roman Abramovich who, at the time still owned Chelsea Football Club before he was forced to relinquish ownership after 19 years of propriety in May, 2022 and Gazprom’s Alexey Miller, whose energy organisation, according to the Ukrainian government, is said to be forming its own private militia. Move over, Wagner.

But no mention of gazillionaire Oleg Deripaska. Really?

I couldn’t help but notice there was no mention by Payne of Deripaska. Why not? At various times cited to be Russia’s wealthiest oligarch and a definite Putin bestie and beastie (apols to beasties) elsewhere, he was a walloping big fish caught in an international haul of lesser big fish.

Oleg giving a despondent Vladimir advice. Photo credit: Sergei Karpukhin/Reuters

Deripaska, the founder of Rusal, is an aluminium/metals/utilities behemoth and apparent gazillionaire. Like other kleptocrats he cannibalized Russia’s state assets privatised after the dissolution of the Soviet Union on Christmas Day, 1991.

Deripaska swapped hammer, sickle with Lafite and carnivorous capitalism

For Deripaska, now a Cypriot as well as Russian citizen, the hammer and sickle was replaced by the likes of Chateau Lafite and carnivorous capitalism.

A renowned luxury glutton, one of his associates described him to me as:

“… generous to his friends and genial company.”

“Tess, you journalists are quick to criticize. I am not saying Oleg is a saint, but he is not a big sinner either.”

Deripaska a serial Houdini, sanctionee

Deripaska is a serial sanctionee. He’s also a perennial Houdini, always plotting and scheming to extricate himself from sanction bondage, covertly and overtly, invariably with the help of ‘friends’ in high, low and subterranean places.

Unlike the quieter Miller, Deripaska is a noisy celebrity global player and headline magnet. Moreover, he’d already had sanctions slapped on him by the UK, USA and other countries.

US Prof Steven Hamilton tweets Payne’s sin of Debraska omission

Others noted Payne’s omission of Deripaska’s name, among them, George Washington University assistant professor of Economics, Steven Hamilton, who also happens to be a Visiting Fellow at the Tax and Transfer Policy Institute of the Australian National University. Hamilton rightly called out we journalists:

“An Australian journalist should ask the Prime Minister and/or Foreign Minister why they have chosen not to sanction either Oleg Deripaska or Viktor Vekselberg, two Russian oligarchs sanctioned by the US with significant financial interests in the Australian resources sector.”
Thank you Mr Hamilton. You’re on the money about those two dudes.

Four days later Payne issued yet another press statement about sanctions and oligarchs, this time naming and shaming Deripaska among other newcomers including banks, to our Russia sanctions list.

Payne, you recall, was enslaven to Morrison’s warped dictatorial one-mannish government and she was regarded as more a follower than a leader according to some who worked close by.

Why was Deripaska initially dropped from Oz sanctions list?

She was no doubt ‘outed’ by Granny England’s press release on March 10, that the ‘big two’ Abramovich and Deripaska were among seven oligarchs targeted in an estimated 15billion pounds “sanction hit.” Took a while for the ruble to drop.

In other words, she had no choice but to finger Deripaska.

It ain’t the international sequencing of sanctions that’s the main issue here but rather the fact that Deripaska was not initially named. Why was that? Had someone got into Payne’s ear? If so, who was that someone? Was it Porter? We don’t know.

Did delay buy time for Deripaska to secure Oz investments?

Did Rio Tinto give Porter the money?

Was the delay in citing Deripaska deliberate, giving the kleptocrat a chance to buy time, to implement strategies to further secure his investments in Oz? Where was Porter when all of this was going on? Did Deripasja’s business comrades in Rio Tinto exert any influence?

We don’t know. Show us the blind trust money Christian Porter. How much did you get and who or what entity gave it to you? Was it a loan? Was it a gift? You have to prove to us that no favors were asked and no favours were granted.

Or Rupert Murdoch a la Kerry Stokes?

The gross misconduct of the Morrison Coalition warrants a light shone into Porter’s blind trust legal costs deposit(s). We would be fools to accept the word of a politician without the provision of evidence.

Was Porter’s benefactor Rupert Murdoch doing a Kerry Stokes a la Ben Roberts-Smith? Or Twiggy deForrest? Or is it Clive Palmer?

One minute Palmer hires Porter in a $300 billion lawsuit against Australia. Next minute he drops him. What’s that all about? Conflict of interest? Did Palmer give that blind trust money to Porter, and then expected Porter to represent him for peanuts? We don’t know.

ACCR warns Oz business about Russian oligarchs, Putin cronies

In February 2022, The Australasian Centre for Corporate Responsibility​ (ACCR) issued a press release calling for Australian companies to immediately review their relationships with companies linked to oligarchs within Russian President Vladimir Putin’s inner circle.

Deripaska, Vekselberg joined at hip pocket with Rio Tinto

And wouldn’t you know it, Deripaska and Vekselberg are joined at the hip pocket with the world champion dynamiters of sacred sites, Rio Tinto; red river in name and red river in shame.

The fossil fuel behemoth committed a brutal act of corporate carnage and spiritual abuse when it blasted its desecrating way into a sacred cave in the Juukan Gorge in the Hamersley Range in WA’s Pilbara region on May 24, 2020; facetiously and disingenuously claiming its legal right to do so under a 2013 permission.

Juukan Gorge: Rio Tinto blasts into the very womb of Australia’s ancient soul

Rio Tinto may as well have blasted its way into the very womb of Australia’s ancient soul and time itself, given the familial lineage of the cave to the First Nations Puutu Kunti Kurrama and Pinikura (Binigura) peoples.

The third anniversary of this corporate massacre has come and gone and many of us continue to grieve alongside the traditional owners at this calumny that can never be undone.

Is it possible Deripaska had some knowledge, even input into the Juukan blasting?

Yes.

We are the beneficiaries of ACCR’s deep dive into Rio Tinto and its entanglements with Russian kleptokrats, especially Deripaska and Vekselberg.

Have a squizzy at their hard work:

  • Queensland Alumina Ltd is a joint venture between Rio Tinto (ASX:RIO) (80%) and Rusal International PJSC (20%).
    • Russian oligarch Oleg Deripaska owns approximately 44.5% of En+ Group International PJSC which in turn owns 56.9% of Rusal International PJSC.
    • Russian oligarch Viktor Vekselberg owns approximately 32.3% of Rusal International PJSC through subsidiary companies SUAL Partners Ltd (21.6%) and Zonoville Investments Ltd (10.7%).

Dan Gosher, ACCR’s Director, of Climate and Environment, was categoric:

“The world has spoken, and the strategy now is to isolate Russia completely. UK-listed petroleum giant BP has announced the sale of its stake in Russian oil company Rosneft, for example. Australian companies must fall in line with this strategy.

“Origin and Rio Tinto’s ongoing cooperation with oligarch-owned companies legitimises Putin’s regime.

“Furthermore, some of the profits from Australian alumina and oil and gas projects will end up in the hands of the people responsible for propping up Putin’s murderous regime.

“The federal government must also ensure that the Origin-Falcon joint venture has not or will not receive any government grants. Grants relating to the ‘gas-fired recovery’ are of particular concern.”

Here’s more forensic analyses from ACCR for those of us concerned about the lack of ethical corporate hygiene in our politics and multinational corporations. Porter’s client seems to have a bottomless supply of moolah and murky carpet baggery:

 

Top five shareholders in Rusal International PJSC as at 25 February 2022:

 

Holder Common Stock Equivalent Held (actual) Percent of Common Shares Outstanding (%) Market Value (AU$M)
En+ Group International public joint-stock company 8,641,786,854 56.88 10,034.2
SUAL Partners Ltd. 3,283,210,512 21.61 3,812.2
Zonoville Investments Ltd 1,625,652,591 10.70 1,887.6
Vanguard Group Inc. 99,249,319 0.65 115.2
BlackRock Inc. 66,901,177 0.44 77.7

 

 

On March 10, 2022, Gosher made another statement welcoming Rio Tinto’s and Worley’s confirmation that they were severing their ties with Russia.

“We welcome the announcements from Rio Tinto and Worley today to ‘terminate commercial relationships’ and ‘withdrawal of services in and into Russia’, respectively.

“We look forward to seeing more detail about the implications for Rio Tinto’s Queensland Alumina joint venture.

“Following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, all Australian companies should sever relationships with companies owned or part owned by oligarchs aligned with Russian President Vladimir Putin.”

Rape of Juukan Gorge implicates Derispaska as well as Rio Tinto

Rio Tinto’s destruction of a spiritual site within the earth’s craggy skin was a knowing act of sacrilege and blasphemy from those who understand only the language of money, the lingua franca of the stock exchange. There is little empathy for those things measured on the index of humanity, all things flesh and blood and the anima mundi in all its dialects.

The corporate and ecological rape of Juukan is unfinished business for Deripaska and his barrister, Christian Porter and the gangsta miners, Rio Tinto. It is unfinished business for Australia: the world.

Rio Tinto’s corporate colonization is well known

Rio Tinto’s record of corporate colonization is well known. Consider the fact that the blowing up of Juukan took place on the sabbath, a holy day for some but a traditionally slow day for newsrooms around the nation, with fewer staff rostered, on duty; not an easy day to scramble and get to Juukan Gorge in a hurry or phone for an uber to cover the story on the ground, notwithstanding the modern accoutrements of drone cameras.

The destruction was a slyly crafted Special Op affair and I am told by an insider that few people other than a small team knew what was going to happen that day. Another insider said that even now, some employees feel ashamed and aggrieved about what Rio Tinto’s senior executives did and remain angry with the discredit and shame they brought to ‘their’ organisation. “So do some of their family members and their mates,” he said. “It was a low act. No getting away from it.”

Low act by Rio Tinto

It was indeed a low act amongst an international charge sheet of low acts by Rio Tinto.

This destructive act was rightly compared with the Taliban’s 2001 pulverising of Afghanistan’s Bamiyan Buddhas with rocket launches, tanks and machine guns.

You might think that Rio Tinto learned a salutary lesson from this spiritual and ecological scandal, but no, they’re still up to their dirty tricks.

Rio Tinto still into dirty tricks – check out crime and corruption project

In March this year the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project’s Daniel Balint-Kurti, a former head of Global Witness, outed a matter concerning Rio Tinto and the former President of Guinea, the aptly named Alpha Conde.’

Here’s a couple of excerpts:

“The Anglo-Australian mining company Rio Tinto agreed to pay a US$15 million penalty to settle with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) the accusation that it had paid $10.5 million to a friend of former Guinean President Alpha Condé to retain globally important iron ore rights.

…The settlement agreement with the U.S. stock exchange regulator said that in 2011, Rio hired a “close friend of a former senior Guinean government official” to help it keep hold of blocks 3 and 4 of the Simandou mountain range, considered to hold some of the world’s largest iron ore reserves.

… The SEC found that the consultant in the middle of the scandal paid $200,000 to buy T-shirts for Condé’s re-election campaign, soon after receiving his first payment from Rio Tinto.

… While the settlement anonymises individuals connected to the bribery, leaked emails reveal that the unnamed “senior government official” is President Condé, and the anonymous “French investment banker” is François Polge de Combret, a friend of Condé from his student days in Paris.

The settlement includes quotes from these emails, which were published in the press seven years ago without Combret’s name and references to “the President.” Condé has denied any knowledge of the payments.

After becoming Guinea’s first democratically elected president since independence in 2010, Condé promised to fight corruption and launched a review of mining contracts, leading Rio Tinto to fear losing its remaining blocks. The company paid $7.5 million into de Combret’s Swiss bank account in July 2011, and a further $3 million in February 2016 as a reward for his influence in allowing the company to keep the licenses.

Rio Tinto also paid $700 million to the Guinean Treasury, under a publicly announced agreement in April 2011, formalizing its continued control over blocks 3 and 4.”

Again, is it possible that Rio Tinto is Porter’s mystery donor? Of course it is. And we must remember that Rio Tinto and Deripaska are in business together. They both have serious form. There’s more.

Take Deripska’s legal Rio Tinto stoush with a grain of basalt

There have since been a succession of legal stoushes between Derispaska and Rio Tinto. We have to take them with a grain of basalt in Rio Tinto’s case. It may be a charade all for show, to prove the multinational is indeed disassociating itself from Deripaska as promised.

US salacious bombshell about Deripaska

On September 29 last year, the United States Justice Department’s Office of Public Affairs released a salacious bombshell headline that screamed:

Russian Oligarch Oleg Vladimirovich Deripaska and Associates Indicted for Sanctions Evasion and Obstruction of Justice

U.S. Citizen Arrested for Her Role in Facilitating Illicit Travel by Deripaska’s Girlfriend and in Real Estate Transactions

* AIM Network is publishing this official document in full below to reveal the extent of the serious US allegations against Deripaska and the alleged extraordinary lengths he will pursue to avoid sanctions, including allegations that his girlfriend Veronina, pregnant with his baby went to the States to have the baby and accrue US benefits and status. Note the US DOJ public affairs gives extensive reasons and evidence. We don’t.

The Press Release continues:

The Justice Department announced today the unsealing of an indictment charging a U.S. citizen and three citizens of the Russian Federation with violating new U.S. sanctions imposed earlier this year in response to Russia’s unprovoked military invasion of Ukraine.

According to court documents, Oleg Vladimirovich Deripaska, aka Oleg Mukhamedshin, 52; and Natalia Mikhaylovna Bardakova, aka Natalya Mikhaylovna Bardakova, 45, both citizens of the Russian Federation (Russia), and Olga Shriki, 42, a New Jersey resident and naturalized U.S. citizen, are charged with conspiring to violate U.S. sanctions imposed on Deripaska and one of Deripaska’s corporate entities, Basic Element Limited (Basic Element). Shriki is further charged with obstruction of justice based on her alleged deletion of electronic records relating to her participation in Deripaska’s sanctions evasion scheme following receipt of a grand jury subpoena requiring the production of those records. Bardakova is charged with one count with making false statements to agents of the FBI. Additionally, Ekaterina Olegovna Voronina, aka Ekaterina Lobanova, 33, is charged with making false statements to agents of the U.S. Department of Homeland Security at the time of Voronina’s attempted entry into the United States for the purpose of giving birth to Deripaska’s child. Shriki was arrested this morning.

“In the wake of Russia’s unjust and unprovoked invasion of Ukraine, I promised the American people that the Justice Department would work to hold accountable those who break our laws and threaten our national security. Today’s charges demonstrate we are keeping that promise,” said Attorney General Merrick B. Garland. “The Justice Department will not stop working to identify, find, and bring to justice those who evade U.S. sanctions in order to enable the Russian regime.”

“As today’s charges reveal, while serving the Russian state and energy sector, Oleg Deripaska sought to circumvent U.S. sanctions through lies and deceit to cash in on and benefit from the American way of life,” said Deputy Attorney General Lisa O. Monaco. “But shell companies and webs of lies will not shield Deripaska and his cronies from American law enforcement, nor will they protect others who support the Putin regime. The Department of Justice remains dedicated to the global fight against those who aid and abet the Russian war machine.”

According to court documents, Deripaska, the owner and controller of Basic Element, a private investment and management company for Deripaska’s various business interests, was subjected to economic sanctions on April 6, 2018. On that day, the U.S. Department of the Treasury’s Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) designated Deripaska as a Specially Designated National (SDN), in connection with its finding that the actions of the Government of the Russian Federation with respect to Ukraine constitute an unusual and extraordinary threat to the national security and foreign policy of the United States (the OFAC Sanctions). In designating Deripaska, OFAC explained that Deripaska was sanctioned for having acted or purported to act for or on behalf of, directly or indirectly, a senior official of the Government of the Russian Federation, as well as for operating in the energy sector of the Russian Federation economy.

“Today’s indictment reflects the FBI’s commitment to use all of the tools at our disposal to aggressively pursue those who attempt to evade the United States’ economic countermeasures against the Russian government,” said FBI Director Christopher Wray. “We will continue to aggressively prosecute those who violate measures imposed to protect the national security and foreign policy of the United States, especially in this time of Russia’s unprovoked aggression toward Ukraine.”

“The indictment unsealed today signals the United States’ ongoing support for the people of Ukraine in the face of continued Russian belligerence,” said U.S. Attorney Damian Williams for the Southern District of New York. “The enforcement of sanctions is a vital tool wielded by this Office and our law enforcement partners as we seek to deter Russian aggression, and today’s indictment should be taken as a warning that, try as they might, individuals violating these sanctions will be held accountable.”

Following his designation by OFAC, Deripaska conspired with others to evade and to violate those sanctions in various ways and over the course of several years. Deripaska, through the corporate entity Gracetown Inc., illegally utilized the U.S. financial system to maintain and retain three luxury properties in the United States (the U.S. Properties), and further employed Olga Shriki and Natalia Mikhaylovna Bardakova to utilize U.S. financial institutions to provide hundreds of thousands of dollars’ worth of services for his benefit in the United States. For example, in or about 2019, Shriki facilitated for Deripaska’s benefit the sale of a music studio in California for over $3 million. Deripaska had owned the studio through a series of corporate shell companies that obscured his actual ownership. Following the sale of the studio, Shriki attempted to expatriate over $3 million in proceeds through one such shell company, Ocean Studios California LLC, to a Russia-based account belonging to another Deripaska company.

Bardakova – largely based in Russia – directed Shriki to engage in particular illegal transactions on Deripaska’s behalf. These instructions included directing Shriki to obtain U.S. goods and technology for Deripaska. Moreover, between in or about May 2018 and in or about 2020, Bardakova instructed Shriki to purchase and send flower and gift deliveries on behalf of Deripaska to Deripaska’s social contacts in the United States and Canada. The deliveries included, among others, Easter gift deliveries to a U.S. television host, two flower deliveries to a then-former Canadian Parliament member, and two flower deliveries in 2020 to Voronina while she was in the United States in 2020 to give birth to Deripaska’s child.

Then, in or about 2020, Shriki and Bardakova helped Deripaska’s girlfriend, Voronina, travel from Russia to the United States, so she could give birth to Deripaska’s and Voronina’s child in the United States. Despite Deripaska’s ongoing support for the Russian regime, he funded hundreds of thousands of dollars of transactions so that his child would take advantage of the U.S. health care system and U.S. birthright citizenship. Despite Deripaska’s ongoing support for the Russian regime, Deripaska distrusted the safety of the Russian hospital system. As alleged, Shriki orchestrated the payment of approximately $300,000 worth of U.S. medical care, housing, childcare, and other logistics to support Voronina to give birth in the United States, which resulted in the child receiving U.S. citizenship. As part of this scheme, Deripaska counseled Voronina on obtaining a U.S. visa, including by telling her to be “careful” ahead of an interview by U.S. immigration authorities. Voronina thereafter applied for and obtained a U.S. visa for a purported 10-day tourism visit without disclosing her intent to travel and stay in the United States for approximately six months to give birth to Deripaska’s child. Following the birth, Shriki, Bardakova, and Voronina conspired to conceal the name of the child’s true father, Deripaska, going so far as to change, slightly, the spelling of the child’s last name.

Later, in or about 2022, Shriki and Bardakova attempted to facilitate Voronina’s return to the United States to give birth to Deripaska’s and Voronina’s second child. This second attempt included Bardakova and Voronina’s attempt to use false statements to conceal Deripaska’s funding and secure Voronina’s entry into the United States – an attempt that was thwarted, and Voronina was denied entry and returned immediately to Istanbul, through which she had flown from Russia to the United States.

Deripaska, Bardakova and Shriki, are charged with one count of conspiring to violate and evade U.S. sanctions, in violation of the International Emergency Economic Powers Act, which carries a maximum sentence of 20 years in prison. Shriki is further charged in one count of destruction of records, which carries a maximum sentence of 20 years in prison. Bardakova and Voronina are each further charged with one count of making false statements to federal agents, which carries a maximum sentence of five years in prison. The indictment also provides notice of the United States’ intention to forfeit from Deripaska the proceeds of his offense, including the U.S. Properties and the proceeds from the sale of the music studio. A federal district court judge will determine any sentence after considering the U.S. Sentencing Guidelines and other statutory factors.

The FBI New York Field Office and Counterintelligence Division are investigating the case, with valuable assistance provided by the Department of Homeland Security and the Justice Department’s National Security Division, Counterintelligence and Export Control Section.

Assistant U.S. Attorneys Anden Chow and Vladislav Vainberg are prosecuting the case.

The investigation was coordinated through the Justice Department’s Task Force KleptoCapture, an interagency law enforcement task force dedicated to enforcing the sweeping sanctions, export controls and economic countermeasures that the United States, along with its foreign allies and partners, has imposed in response to Russia’s unprovoked military invasion of Ukraine. Announced by the Attorney General on March 2 and run out of the Office of the Deputy Attorney General, the task force will continue to leverage all of the department’s tools and authorities to combat efforts to evade or undermine the collective actions taken by the U.S. government in response to Russian military aggression.

An indictment is merely an allegation, and all defendants are presumed innocent until proven guilty beyond a reasonable doubt in a court of law.

It’s time to act NOW, Albo

It is time for Albo to rectify the great wrong done to the Australian people not only by Porter but also the previous government. Parliament voted against Porter’s blind trust matter being examined by the privileges committee.

This from The Guardian’s Katharine Murphy:

“… Porter’s blind trust issue should have gone to the privileges committee.

No ifs, buts or maybes.

Nobody has anything to fear from the conventional deliberative processes of the parliament. This is no big deal. This is how the system is supposed to work.

An inquiry would have been entirely routine. After examining the facts, if the privileges committee was troubled by the blind trust precedent – and from my vantage point there are a bunch of reasons why it should be – then it could have set some boundaries.

But instead we had stonewalling. We had the sound of wagons being circled.

We had the appearance of the government sweeping something important under a rug…”

I share Murphy’s views on this and remind our Prime Minister that he has spoken against the Porter blind trust matter both in and outside of Parliament.

The then Speaker, Tony Smith agreed there was a “prima facie” case for the Porter matter to go to the privileges committee. In an unprecedented rebuff of a Speaker’s recommendation, the then Morrison government voted against the Labor motion referring the matter, and was narrowly defeated, 52 votes to 49.

There is much unfinished business in this squalid affair and it is now up to the Albanese government and this parliament to do the right thing and right this wrong.

It’s not just about the money, Albo. And you know it. We all know it. Get this sorted. Please.

DISCLAIMER: Once again, neither I nor AIM Network are imputing anyone of wrongdoing. In the face of deliberate government suppression to exact the true facts of Porter’s donors, we are all invited to speculate as to who or what they were.

Part Two: More Deripaska’s links, Cristian Porter, Bob Dole, Manafort, Kushner and others

© Tess Lawrence

Tess Lawrence is Contributing editor-at-large for Independent Australia and her most recent article is The night Porter and allegation of rape.

 

 

 

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Are you listening to the Voice and what it’s really saying?

The muddying of the waters has begun. As did Howard and Abbott with the Republic referendum, Peter Dutton and others have taken another step in dirtying what was once a crystal-clear attempt to give the First Nations people a say in matters concerning their future.

The go-to tool of the provocateur is fear. And although we have nothing to fear but fear itself, we have witnessed, of late, all the signs that signal a fear campaign from Dutton and his acolytes against the Voice.

Extreme anger, outrageous indistinguishability and narcissistic behaviour usually accompany fear. We should have no fear of the extent those who oppose the Voice will go to prevent any advancement of Aboriginal norms.

Does fear work? My word, it does, provided people are fearful.

We recently had the spectacle of a former Australian Prime Minister, Multiple Ministries Morrison, the debaucher of Westminster conventions, defending them when applied to the Aboriginal race. On top of that, Dutton shirt fronted the “divisive, disrupting and democracy- alterating Canberra- based Voice”, saying it would “re-racialize Australia“.

All this fear against a proposal overseen and designed by the Parliament. So ridiculous and fearful was Dutton that he went further. An outburst of shrill mouth syndrome occurred on May 31.

“It would have an Orwellian effect where all Australians are equal, but some are more equal than others.”

What scintilla of evidence supports this statement? Is he telling us that his party is officially further to the right under his leadership? He went on to say.

“… instead of being “one” we will be divided, in spirit, and in law.”

When asked, but a few months ago, Dutton couldn’t explain just where his mind was regarding the Voice.

Now he thinks he knows the mind of the entire nation.

Maybe this sudden burst of outlandish language is meant to tell the truth about his walking out of Rudd’s 2008 Apology to the Stolen Generation. Was he wiping the table clean, waiting for this opportunity?

All this anti-Voice propaganda is being fed to us on social media in bulk – shitloads of it, daily racist thoughts for the unthinking citizen feeling intimidated by fear itself. I am tossing up between my country’s history and its future.

The drivel flows thick and fast on muddy waters sullied by racism.

  • “Sorry, can’t support racism in any form. #VoteNo.”
  • “I cannot support the mechanism of slavery.”
  • “Being a good citizen means saying no to racism and apartheid.”
  • “Safety first, Vote no for a better future.

The subtlety of these seemingly innocent words would seem harmless, but they are full of racism. The sort that Vance Packard might call “Hidden Persuaders“.

Good moral leaders wouldn’t go near these sorts of unethical propaganda methods, but as Howard and Abbott did in 1999, Dutton has no misgivings in doing so.

Dutton, of course, has a long history of antagonism when it comes to putting down disadvantaged people. He has form, as they say. Here’s an example of his ‘form’, courtesy of Wikipedia:

Inappropriate rising sea jokes, comments on Muslim Lebanese immigration, Manus Island and his lie about a 5-year-old boy.

He granted a visa to another au pair, despite his department warning him that she was at risk of breaching her work conditions on her tourist visa.

In 2015, Dutton denied claims made by Greens Senator Sarah Hanson-Young that she was spied on during a visit to Nauru. She was.

Before the 2016 election, Dutton said of refugees, “Many… won’t be numerate or literate in their own language, let alone English.”

In a 2015 poll by Australian Doctor magazine, based on votes from over 1,100 doctors, Dutton was voted the worst health minister in the last 35 years by 46 per cent of respondents.

In March 2018, Dutton made calls to treat white South African farmers as refugees, stating that “they need help from a civilized country.”

As both Immigration Minister and Home Affairs Minister, Peter Dutton has defended an amendment to the Migration Act 1958 that facilitates the denial or cancellation of Australian visas for non-citizens on “character” grounds.

New Zealand nationals living in Australia were disproportionately affected by this “character test”, with over 1,300 New Zealanders being deported from Australia between January 2015 and July 2018.

Professor Patrick Keyzer and Dave Martin of La Trobe University criticized Dutton’s pedophilia remarks as misleading. He contended that most deportees from Australia had spent most of their lives in Australia and had little ties to New Zealand.

In September 2019, Dutton called the two children of the Biloela family “anchor babies.”

In October and November 2019, Dutton expressed his views on protesters and police response. He stated that when protesters break the law. “There needs to be mandatory or minimum sentences imposed.

In November 2019, Dutton said that the States should make protesters pay for the cost of police response to demonstrations.

In December 2019, Dutton announced that airport security measures would be increased to detect, deter and respond to potential threats to aviation safety. Measures include greater use of canines and the deployment of extra protective services personnel armed with MK18 short-barrelled rifles.

In March 2021, Dutton was appointed Minister for Defence. On May 21, 2021, Dutton directed the department and serving military personnel to stop pursuing a “woke agenda” and cease holding events to mark the International Day Against Homophobia, Biphobia, Interphobia and Transphobia, where staff wore rainbow clothing.

In November 2021, he branded former Prime Minister Paul Keating as “Grand Appeaser Comrade Keating.”

On June 16 2021, in the Federal Court, Justice Richard White ordered Dutton to attend mediation over a defamation suit he brought against refugee activist Shane Bazzi over a tweet calling him a “rape apologist”. In August 2020, it was announced this mediation had failed.

In January 2018, Dutton said that people in Melbourne are scared of going out because of “gang violence” involving African Australians but were “ridiculed” for it by people who live in Melbourne.

Dutton opposes any changes to negative gearing, which offers tax breaks to property investors, saying in May 2017 that changing it would harm the economy. He owns six properties with his wife, including a shopping centre in Townsville.

He opposes the Australian Republic and supports Australian school kids taking the Oath of Allegiance in schools, as new Australian citizens do.

His actions publicly have been in opposition to same-sex marriage.

Dutton supports the intake of white refugees fleeing the South African farm attacks. In 2018, amid pressure from the South African Australian community for a unique immigration intake for their family members, he declared that Afrikaners required refugee status in Australia because of the high level of violent crime in South Africa and “the horrific circumstances they face” in South Africa.

My backgrounding of Dutton is to highlight the character of the man leading the NO campaign in this referendum.

The Opposition Leader is orchestrating a not-so-thinly disguised plan to con the Australian people into believing they have something to fear from amending the constitution. Nothing could be further from the truth.

Continued tomorrow: How Dutton plans to scare the shit out of you.

My thought for the day

We dislike and resist change in the foolish assumption that we can make permanent that which makes us feel secure. Yet change is part of the very fabric of our existence.

 

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Whither Constitutional Change?

Within a very short space of time, we are going to be embroiled in a national discussion on constitutional change: namely, we are going to be asked if we favour First Nations people having a voice to our national parliament enshrined in our Constitution. The purpose of this article is not to take sides or to push one argument over another. Rather, it is to explore the options and the processes that contribute to a national constitutional referendum and to generate discussion.

Constitutional change in this country is fraught as the Constitution can only be amended by referendum, through the procedure set out in section 128. A successful referendum requires a ‘double majority’: a national majority of voters plus a federal majority of states (i.e. four of the six states).

The votes of those living in the ACT, the NT and any of Australia’s external territories count towards the national majority only.

Since 1901 there have been 19 referendums but of the forty-four referendum questions posed only eight have passed: The last constitutional referendum was for an Australian Republic held on 6 November 1999 – it failed. Usually, there are multiple questions to be resolved at each referendum – this time it appears there will only be one although it could be argued that there is some serious housekeeping necessary to tidy up our Constitution – perhaps that’s a question for another day.

Timing for a referendum is critical as is political consensus. Labor have already said that they favour a referendum in their first term and Pat Dodson, the special envoy for reconciliation and implementation of the Uluru Statement from the heart, favours a referendum on 27 May, 2023 – that is the 56th anniversary of the successful 1967 referendum allowing the commonwealth to make laws for Indigenous people and count them in the census, and the sixth anniversary of the Uluru statement.

So far the coalition has only said that it is open to supporting a referendum but wants to see more detail and the model to be put to the Australian people. This is a change in the position of the Morrison government. Indeed, Morrison ruled out a referendum quite specifically in the lead-up to the 2022 election; “It’s not our policy to have a referendum on the Voice” he told us. His minister for Indigenous Australians, Ken Wyatt, had favoured legislation for a voice and intimated that this would go before the parliament prior to the 2022 election but clearly, this didn’t occur as there was limited interest from coalition members and the then leadership.

The suggestion by Wyatt that a legislated voice, even as an interim measure, was shouted down by Aboriginal groups who generally considered that legislation was unsatisfactory and could be changed at a political whim and only an entrenchment in our Constitution would give any long-term certainty and continuity.

The road to constitutional change is not an easy one and the enabling legislation for a referendum has first to be passed by both houses of our parliament to set the process in motion. Already there are fears that not all parties are on the same page. Newly elected Country Liberal Party senator Jacinta Nampijinpa Price a self-described Warlpiri-Celtic woman is suggesting caution on what she considers to be Labor’s policy on the Voice. She said recently that she was taking a cautious approach:

“We’ve got to understand what Labor proposes through this Voice process, and we’ve got to take a look at that before we take a clearer position on it, but I would certainly urge my colleagues to prioritise [more critical] issues,” she said.

“[The Voice] she said doesn’t clearly outline how in fact we’re going to solve some of our really critical issues, issues that I’ve been very much campaigning on for many years around family and domestic violence, around child sexual abuse, around education.”

The Greens are also taking a wait-and-see attitude and are suggesting that they would prefer to see “a truth-telling and treaty process begin before action on an Indigenous Voice”.

There has been considerable consultation over the past five years since the Uluru statement and this has produced the Indigenous Voice Co-Design Process report.

This report recommends that the Voice should comprise 24 elected members, with two drawn from each of the states and territories, two from the Torres Strait Islands, five additional remote representatives drawn from the Northern Territory, Western Australia, Queensland, South Australia and New South Wales, and one member representing Torres Strait Islanders on the mainland.

How much power, influence or authority this group would have on our government and parliament is not yet established but it is an advisory body and would not have a veto on our legislative process and would not be an additional chamber to our parliament as suggested by Malcolm Turnbull initially.

The Turnbull and Morrison governments demonstrated their then objection to a constitutional voice in saying:

“Our democracy is built on the foundation of all Australian citizens having equal civic rights … a constitutionally enshrined additional representative assembly for which only Indigenous Australians could vote for or serve in is inconsistent with this fundamental principle.”

If the Dutton opposition were to maintain this fundamental argument then, the referendum would have little chance of passing.

The form of question to be put to the Australian people will obviously be critical to the success of the referendum but it seems probable that the question will be posed in general terms with the detail and structure to follow in the form of legislation enacted through the parliament: ideally, this draft legislation would be available prior to the referendum so, there is a lot of work to be done if the May 2023 date it to be met.

The legislation governing the process for referendums in Australia is laid down in the Referendum (Machinery Provisions) Act 1994. Among other provisions, this legislation, by section 8, sets out the procedure for presenting the ‘for’ and ‘against’ arguments which need to be communicated to each elector prior to the referendum.

There are, of course, political risks for the Albanese government in the whole process and already some in the opposition are labelling the process as ‘Labor’s referendum’ which, of course, it isn’t. However, if the referendum were to fail or not receive bipartisan support the political fallout for the Albanese government could be damaging in its first term.

We shall see!

 

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The rebirth of Donald Trump has biblical overtones, but can he win?

Who else but Florida Governor Ron DeSantis would be game enough to shape up to Donald Trump? A man who encouraged a pack of lowlifes to overthrow the Government because he felt (and still does) he had been robbed of a presidential victory. Millions of his followers side with him, despite the evidence to the contrary.

One thousand men have been charged, and one hundred have been convicted over the invasion by supporters of then-President Donald Trump when they swarmed the US Capitol on January 6, 2021

He is the only President in history to be impeached twice.

A jury of six men and three women recently awarded the writer E. Jean Carroll $5 million in damages after finding him guilty of sexual abuse and defamation. Trump called the verdict a “disgrace“. Carroll now seeks an additional $10 million after the former President called her a “whack job” in a town hall meeting.

It gets worse. He will also:

“… face a criminal trial on March 25, 2024, over charges he falsified business records to conceal money paid to silence porn star Stormy Daniels in 2016.

That means Trump will be going on trial during the heart of the 2024 presidential nominating primaries, when he and his rivals to be the Republican candidate will be criss-crossing the country to drum up support among the party faithful.”

And so the story of this brainless cote continues. Trump is now in his second coming. Like Lazarath, he has risen from the dead to again challenge for the Presidency.

His first coming was like that of a Messiah, “I am the way the truth and the life“. Without wanting in any way to compare him with Jesus, one cannot but help to notice the similarities with Trump’s messianic messages.

Jesus was a messiah who wanted to rid the world of its sin, whereas Trump sang “My Way”, as if he had some sort of ownership of righteousness.

I’m not suggesting comparisons of virtue, but analogies of each one’s place in the world say that Jesus was all grace, compassion, and forgiveness. Trump had narcissism deeply embedded in the maze that is his brain. He admitted to being a genius. It’s my way, my truth, and only I can restore the great American dream.

Who but a narcissist would say such things? Who but a climate denialist would appoint acolytes with a long history of climate denialism to his cabinet?

But his troubles mount:

“In April, the New York Times reported that in an extraordinary appearance at the Criminal Courts Building in Lower Manhattan on Tuesday, Mr Trump pleaded not guilty to 34 felony counts related to his role in what prosecutors described as a hush-money scheme to clear his path to the Presidency in 2016.”

More will be added, yet this man with a “mental illness” will again run for President of the United States despite all his abuse, convictions, lies, and denial.

Only a sick man who thinks he is “the way, the truth and the life” would dismiss an established scientific view without training in climate change. In fact, one would have to be gullible in the extreme to do so.

Or perhaps not. Perhaps it takes a man with a messianic message that says, “Greed is good.” That nothing, repeat nothing, comes before the great American dream of the land of milk and honey. That everyone is entitled to be rich above and beyond all other considerations. That regulations only get in the way. Science has a place if it enhances wealth, but it must be ignored if it prevents it.

Only a man who thinks he is some sort of capitalist Messiah would say such things. He had a cabinet of old white men and a few women who followed the Messiah’s teaching, “I am the way, the truth and the life.” In their lust for wealth before enlightenment they created an arrogance beyond measure; a vulgar display of wealth and success designed to impress a world in meltdown.

The former President is a recorded serial liar, yet millions still believe him and will vote for him. Only in America.

During his years in office Trump made the most outrageous claims to exaggerate the extent of his accomplishments. He overstated his achievements on everything from tax reform to manufacturing investments.

Venerable writer and commentator Robert Reich has likened him to Senator Joe McCarthy, who called hundreds of people communists during the 50s, thus ruining many lives. McCarthy’s advisor was attorney Roy Cohn, an expert at character assassination and mentor to Donald Trump.

Can this seriously flawed sex-crazed excuse for manhood win the Presidency in 2024? Currently, incumbent President Joe Biden is the favourite at most betting agencies. Biden has around +135 election odds. Donald Trump is about +250 at most sportsbooks, and Florida Governor Ron DeSantis is +550.

As an outsider, I find it disturbing that a political party like the GOP, or any political party, would allow a person with Trump’s gutter personality to represent it, knowing what they know. And secondly, how is it that a country like the United States of America is so embracing of his condition that its people might reelect him regardless of his questionable mental capacity.

Can he win? I don’t know. Strange things happen in a country that allows its children to be murdered in its schools. Where religion dominates its politics and its debt reaches thirty-five trillion dollars. Where black lives don’t matter, and women don’t either.

“Only in America” rings true.

My thought for the day

American exceptionalism is a concept that should not be included in the same sentence as making America great again.

 

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Ben Roberts-Smith: The Breaking of a Plaster Saint

It was an ugly case lasting five years with a host of ugly revelations. But what could be surprising about the murderous antics of a special arm of the military, in this case, the Australian Special Air Service Regiment, which was repeatedly deployed on missions in an open-ended war which eventually led to defeat and withdrawal?

Ben Roberts-Smith was meant to be a poster boy of the regiment, the muscular noble representative who served in Afghanistan, a war with sketchy justifications. Along the way, he became Australia’s most decorated soldier, raking in the Medal of Gallantry in 2006, the Victoria Cross in 2010, and a Commendation for Distinguished Services for outstanding leadership in over 50 high-risk operations in 2012. He came to be lionised in the popular press, even being named “Father of the Year” in 2013.

A number of his colleagues, keen to take him down a peg or two, saw through the sheen. As did journalists at The Age, The Sydney Morning Herald, and The Canberra Times. The deployments by the special forces to Afghanistan had not, as the narrative would have it, been paved with heroic engagements of military valour. Roberts-Smith, it seemed, was less plaster saint than ruthless executioner and bully.

Some of the transgressions reported on by the papers were very much of the same type investigated by the Inspector-General of the Australian Defence Force. The findings were eventually made available in the stomach churning Brereton Report, released in 2020.

But even prior to that, a 2016 report by sociologist Samantha Crompvoets, commissioned by the Special Operations Commander of Australia (SOCAUST), noted body count competitions and the use of the Joint Priority Effects List (JPEL) among special force personnel sent to Afghanistan. The JPEL became what effectively amounted to a “sanctioned kill list”. Unsurprisingly, the numbers that were put forth were cooked, often featuring the gratuitous torture and killing of unarmed villagers.

Roberts-Smith, incensed by the reporting, commenced defamation proceedings against the three papers in question, and the journalists Nick McKenzie, Chris Masters and David Wroe. The use of such a civil weapon is often odious, a measure designed to intimidate scribblers and reporters from publishing material that might enlighten. While the defamation laws have been mildly improved since the trial’s commencement, featuring a public interest defence, the publishers here could only really avail themselves of the truth defence.

In the proceedings, three groups of articles featured, sporting a ghoulish succession of allegations. The first, published on June 8 and 9, 2018, are said to have conveyed three imputations: that Roberts-Smith “murdered an unarmed and defenceless Afghan civilian, by kicking him off a cliff and procuring the soldiers under his command to shoot him”; that he also breached moral and legal rules of military engagement thereby making him a criminal; and “disgraced his country Australia and the Australian army by his conduct as a member of the SASR in Afghanistan.”

The second group of articles, published on June 9 and 10 that year, were alleged to convey three imputations of murder, including the pressuring of a new, inexperienced SASR recruit to execute an elderly, unarmed Afghan as part of the “blood the rookie” ritual and the killing of a man with a prosthetic leg.

The third group of articles, published in August 2018, contain a whole medley of imputations including alleged domestic violence against a woman at Canberra’s Hotel Realm; the authorising of an unarmed Afghan’s execution by a junior member of his patrol; assaults on unarmed Afghans; bullying of one of the troops – one Trooper M – and threatening to report another soldier – trooper T – to the International Criminal Court for firing on civilians “unless he provided an account of a friendly fire incident that was consistent with the applicant’s”.

The trial ended in July 2022, after 110 days of legal submissions and evidence. During its course, Roberts-Smith, through his lawyers, dismissed the reliability of the eyewitness accounts. They were the bitter offerings of jealousy and mania, products of fantasy and fabulism.

On June 1, the Federal Court Justice Anthony Besanko found against Roberts-Smith. The three papers, along with the journalists, had made out the defence of substantial truth of several imputations made under the Defamation Act 2005 of New South Wales. The defence of contextual truth was also successful on a number of claims.

Most damning for Roberts-Smith was the establishment of the substantial truth of the first three imputations: the murder of a defenceless Afghan in Darwan by means of kicking him off a cliff and ordering troops to fire upon him, breaching the laws of military engagement and disgracing the country’s armed forces. The newspapers had not, however, established the Particulars of Truth on two missions – that to Syahchow (October 20, 2012) and Fasil (November 5, 2012). Contextual truth was also made out on the allegations of domestic violence and bullying claims.

The net effect of the claims proven to be substantially and contextually true meant that the unproven statements had done little to inflict overall damage upon the soldier’s reputation. The plaster saint had cracked.

In the assessment of Peter Bartlett, law partner at the firm MinterEllison and also one of the lawyers representing the papers, “Never has Australia seen a media defendant face such challenges from a plaintiff and his funders. This is an enormous and epic win for freedom of speech and the right for the public to know.”

Fine words. Yet this murky case does little to edify the efforts of a unit that executed its missions with a degree of frightening zeal, let alone the commanders that deployed its members in the first place. Therein lies the uncomfortable truth to the whole matter. When trained killers perform their job well, morality beats a hasty retreat. Expectations of priestly judgment and pastoral consideration evaporate before the use of force. The ultimate saddling of responsibility must always lie higher up the chain of command, ending in the offices of the Prime Minister and Cabinet.

Even now, the journalists involved claim they can find gemstones in the gutter, better angels among depraved beasts. According to James Chessell, managing director at Nine, which owns the three newspapers, the ruling was “a vindication for the brave soldiers of the SAS who served their country with distinction, and then had the courage to speak the truth about what happened in Afghanistan.” But did it really do that?

.

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Why wouldn’t you vote Yes?

Firstly, may I acknowledge the Traditional Custodians of the land to which I am writing from today, and I pay my respects to Elders past and present.

The words in the headline of my article are not mine, but I do embrace them from both the social and legal context in which they were spoken. I shall return to these words at the conclusion of this article, as they continue to resonate in my mind with clarity and conviction.

My opinion so scribed today is not emanating from the province of politics, which regrettably seems to be playing out in all forms of media about the proposed referendum to the Constitution of the Commonwealth of Australia (‘Constitution’) “to alter the Constitution to recognise the First Peoples of Australia by establishing an Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Voice” (‘Voice’). The pollution of politics regarding the assessment of any legal implications of the Voice are too parochial in their scope. Regrettably the modern Australian media as always miss the answer to the question of any legal implication of an amendment to the Constitution, even if the answer was tattooed on the rear end of a 100-foot-high vehicle. Also, my words do not carry with them the imprimatur of the Bar Association of Queensland, rather they are my own.

So that those of you who are reading this article understand the words of the proposed amendment, I set out immediately below the link to the Voice:

Further, so that you may consider the various arguments being agitated by either side of those campaigning for or against the Voice, I set out immediately below the links to the websites for the proponents of the yes vote and no vote:

Vote Yes for the Voice

First Nation’s Voice to Parliament: The Argument for Voting NO

I am voting yes. I do not profess to be an expert, as such, in constitutional law, but I do rely upon the erudite analysis of the Voice by the Hon Mr. Kenneth Hayne AC KC (‘Justice Hayne’) as he is a jurist in whom I do hold my confidence regarding an analysis of any supposed legal implication. That is not because Justice Hayne aligns with my views about the Voice, rather it is because after having read his judgments for the past 20 or so years I have always considered his reasons regarding constitutional law to be those of pure theory of ‘what is the law’ as opposed to ‘what the law or ought to be’.

Last Monday evening, 15 May 2023, I attended a seminar organised by the Australian Institute of Administrative Law- Queensland Chapter, and Justice Hayne presented his spoken analysis about the Voice, during which he opined:

  1. at the commencement of his speech there is no legitimate fear or concern for implementing the Voice into the Constitution.
  2. the central words of the proposed subsection 129(2) notably state “may make representations”; those words are just that, representations, and they only provide for speaking to, not speaking in, Parliament.
  3. the provisions could not be understood to mean any changes to the Parliamentary or Executive powers. The words are spare and lacking in complexity.
  4. there is no power of veto, nor is there a power to interrupt or delay the Parliamentary or Executive powers.
  5. the words do not require the Executive or Parliament to seek out the Voice, because it is entirely up to the Parliament or the Executive to take into the account the Voice.
  6. if Parliament did legislate to take into account the Voice, it would only be a matter of judicial review to challenge a law which is no more than the normal application of the rule of law. If there was a ground of judicial review all that would be required of the Parliament or Executive is to take into account the representation, but they are not bound by it.
  7. regarding the two points frequently being raised by some people the High Court may draw inferences from the Voice or the Voice may entrench division, Justice Hayne said regarding:

(a) legal implications, what would be implied? How could any implication be made? The words could not be construed to interrupt, hinder or prevent the ordinary working of government. The statement “the courts are coming”, are we to fear the courts doing their work? It is an ill based contention.

(b) racial implications, it has been received law since Mabo this land did not start with the arrival of the First Fleet. It was not terra nullius. Approximately 65,000 years of custom were not extinguished. We cannot ignore the early settlers took the land without consent. As Sir Gerard Brennan said in Mabo about Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people, “their dispossession underwrote the country.” The legal and historical facts explain the disadvantage to First Nations. Further, regarding the equality argument the law has always strived to like cases to cases and to distinguish cases from cases; the appeal to twentieth century Europe is without foundation as the equality contention adopts an argument of race and there is no discernible content of any utility.

  1. the Voice does not take away any right, and it does not hinder Parliament. To ameliorate the torment of powerlessness the Voice seeks reform to empower. Rejecting the call would further injure First Nations for decades.

Justice Hayne’s analysis is not one of politics. Justice Hayne’s analysis is in my opinion pure theory of what is the law of the Voice. Justice Hayne’s analysis informs the scope of the Voice, and his analysis is not posited from a place of fear or emotion.

I now turn to the words contained within the headline to my article, as they are not my words but those of Justice Crowley who also spoke during the seminar last Monday night. Justice Crowley is the first Aboriginal or Torres Strait Islander person in Australia to be appointed as a Supreme Court justice. His Honour is an impressive person, not only because he displays erudition, but there is also a dignity to his manner which emanates from a place of compassion which is untrammeled by any matters of the racism he endured during his early life. As I stated at the outset of this article, Justice Crowley so eloquently stated last Monday evening, “Why wouldn’t you vote yes.” It is a yes from me, as I hope it is from all of you.

 

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Scott Morrison and Australia’s Lobby Complex

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

In March, he proved particularly jingoistic, telling Sky News Australia that Canberra needed, not only its “own capability” but “the interlocking alignments and alliances that actually provide the counterbalance to the threat.” This was code for a further renting of Australian sovereignty, a concept that has become increasingly irrelevant.

Morrison’s movement to the world of the consultant-lobbyist is a seamless one, unsurprising given his innate incapacity to understand the broader public interest. It is even questionable whether he ever left that cosmos, being very much a colluder and conniver in murky, unaccountable transactions forged in a “mates” world.

From the other side of the policy aisle, he engaged the Liberal Party lobby firm Crosby Textor in 2005 during his disastrous stint as director of Tourism Australia. Crosby Textor also gained much during Morrison’s prime ministership, having its advisors, including Yaron Finkelstein, posted to positions in the Prime Minister’s office. For Finkelstein, access to the PM was plum and exclusive.

If recent reports are correct, Morrison is staying true to form, heading to work for a UK business with ties to the defence sector. As one source put it, “He won’t go until it is locked in but it is fair to say he is actively seeking life after politics.” That same source also revealed that the defence business was involved in “the AUKUS space”.

When asked to comment on the issue, the habitually mendacious MP for Cook claimed to be “very engaged with things in my local electorate and enjoying being back in my local community.” Such enjoyment was evidently being shared alongside his role as advisory board member for the US-based Hudson Institute’s China Centre, a position he was appointed to in December last year.

The latest revelations, if true, make it a splendid state of affairs for a figure seen as essential in – history will reveal how much in due course – in brokering the grotesquely indulgent, needless AUKUS security pact.

As the Saturday Paper rightly points out, Morrison is not “going to the other side”. He had “always been a shill for corporate interests. His approach to defence was always about his fortunes, not his country’s.” Accordingly, his relations with the defence industry, even as Prime Minister, evinced a shameless sense of planning for the future, when the gold-plated lobbyist door would be flung open.

Morrison’s behaviour is merely emblematic of the broader problem of lobbyists and their location at the heart of Australian politics. As practitioners of a craft often shrouded in secrecy, they sell their services in order to woo and convince the political classes about their merits. A minister new to the portfolio can be particularly susceptible, reaching out beyond the pool of expertise within the department. This can be a hazardous enterprise: no longer is one seeking advice delivered without fear or favour by a public servant, but by one most happy to pursue a naked agenda.

In 2021-22, the Morrison government spent $20.8 billion on consultants and outsourced services amounting to some 37% of the entire workforce. The Australian public service audit of employment found that the equivalent of nearly 54,000 full time staff were employed in that capacity.

The lobbying code of conduct, the register of lobbyists, and the ministerial code of conduct have done little to overcome these pressing problems in Canberra. Senior ministers have found it irresistible to toss a few gobbets of information towards their friends and acquaintances on how best their consultancy firms might acquire government contracts. The outgoing MP and shadow assistant treasurer, Stuart Robert, was a stellar example.

As for Morrison himself, he has a mere six months to go in satisfying the ludicrous 18-month grace period before lobbying on issues connected with his former portfolio of interests. Given that he secretly got himself appointed to numerous portfolios other than his own, the list is extensive. The time, however, is woefully inadequate, and does nothing to dispel any conflict of interest.

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

A few suggestions have been made to correct these maladies of the ailing democratic process. Appointment diaries of elected representatives and senior bureaucrats, as a start, can be made open to the voter. This is certainly the view of barrister and spokesman for the Australian Lawyers Alliance Greg Barns, and it is a sensible one. But short of adding fangs to any measure, the heated and busy revolving door of Australian politics and the private sector will continue to spin. Morrison can be assured of prancing out with impunity in “the AUKUS space”.

 

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Shame The Coronation Lacked Roy And H.G.’s Insights!

As someone who takes no more than a passing interest in the Royal Family, I found myself watching King Charles III’s Coronation. I know, I know, you probably think that I should be interested in the person who has the ultimate say on all our laws and who may with just the stroke of a pen dismiss the Governor-General for no other reason than Linda Hurley starts singing…

Actually, that would be damned fine reason, but the point I’m making is that Charles could step in and announce that he’s appointing David Attenborough as our GG with the express instruction that any legislation supporting fossil fuels is to be sent back to the Parliament without Royal Assent.

Whatever, I found myself watching the Coronation and checking the Twitter comments at the same time. It was unfortunate that they weren’t scrolling along the bottom of the screen as some programs have been known to do, but I should clear up some of the misconceptions:

  • This was a Coronation and not – as some suggested – a silly hat competition with the winner getting a ride in a gold carriage. I mean this was obvious from the fact that Julie Bishop wasn’t the winner.
  • A remark that Princess Anne “was mounted within minutes of leaving the Abbey” by one of the commentators was misunderstood by many. It was not the result of some inappropriate activity in the service due to boredom, but referred to her being ready to ride her horse as part of the procession.
  • Some suggested that Prince Andrew and Prince Harry were seated together. I cannot confirm this, as they were apparently blocked by the feather on Princess Anne’s hat. However, I can say that it wasn’t an attempt to ostracise the poor man by seating him next to someone who’s been accused of having inappropriate relationships. No, Prince Andrew was more than happy to sit next Harry because it took attention away from the fact that his date for the occasion had been unable to get leave from her boarding school because of upcoming exams.
  • It is quite normal for the wife of the King to be called Queen Consort and this does not refer to any consorting that Camilla may or may not have done.
  • It is not usual for the corgis to attend the Coronation. They have not, in fact, been put down because none of the Royals wanted them. They are living with Fergie because none of the Royals wanted them.
  • The Archbishop was not expected to know his lines even though he’s had years to learn them. The fact that someone had to hold a book for him to read from is one of those adorable traditions where priests would show off by reading when most of the congregation couldn’t.
  • No, it would not have been funny if Charles had suffered a heart attack and we had to do this all again in a few weeks.
  • There were shots of people camped out, but they were there because they wanted to be there and not because they were homeless. If they were homeless they’d have been moved to somewhere less visible so that their poverty didn’t upset the King on such an important day.
  • The various gowns of the priests and bishops are not considered dresses (Julie excepted!) I feel the need to point this out so that the groups in Victoria that are protesting Drag Queen story time don’t feel the need to shut down churches. Of course, the protestors are upset that they’re being called Nazis when only one of them is actually a nazi. The rest are just ordinary people prepared to disrupt democratically elected councils, interrupt events where children are being read to and to burn any books that they believe are inappropriate. This is no reason to compare them to people who disrupted government and burnt books.

I fell asleep and missed the part where I was meant to swear my allegiance to the King so I’ll just have to wait until the next monarch…

 

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Submarines and Parking Tickets, and High Farce in the ‘No’ campaign

A waft of V05 and humbug hung in the air when the tinnitus in a trouser suit that is Michaelia Cash was handed the drivel shtick for the Tories’ latest FUD campaign – their vilification du jour being the Indigenous Voice to Parliament. “Thoil innerfear with our summaroines ‘n’ parggin’ tiggeds, moite. Anythink they doan loike thoil toike to the hoi cawt. Air cunnry will go to the dorgs” intoned Blah Stupenda in a strident tirade of sanctimonious cant and poorly disguised bigotry (I may have paraphrased a tad given the semi-intelligible, high velocity boganese of ol’ Helmet Hair but the tone is authentic).

In the absence of ideas, vision, empathy or morals it was a given that Schrödinger’s Opposition, in desperate attempts at relevance, would oppose all government initiatives – but the Voice was a gimme for their ‘open tongs in the kitchen drawer’ attitude to fairness and decency. The profusion of flight risks that is their party room has awoken to the notion that their repertoire of punching down, dog-whistling to racists, provoking culture wars, terrifying the tremulous, deceiving the ignorant and cultivating the stupid could all be weaponised for the one issue they’ll take to the Führer bunker. In the midst of the Coalition’s existential crisis, keeping the Blackfellas in their place is THE issue the Libs are prepared to fight for survival on.

And no ‘No’ campaign would be complete without the presence of Captain No himself – Tony “Strop” Abbott, flicking his tongue and licking his eyeballs and giving creedence to the notion that lizard people do walk amongst us. Crusader Rabid has joined the fray to deploy the same level of watery stools that passed for policy in the Credlin-Abbott “government” (sic) – destroying the nation-building NBN and carbon neutrality, and the cringe-de-la-cringe, his knighting of a foreign monarch’s consort. The most laughable aspect of Tone’s argument, and that’s quite the challenge, is that this forelock tugging, knee-bending arch-monarchist thinks that hearing disenfranchised Indigenous citizens’ opinions is akin to annointing them with House of Lords status. This is fish looking for a barrel stuff.

They’ll bow and scrape to the monarch of a foreign land, they’ll profess “humble affection” and “obedience” to the head of England’s special breeding program for hooray-Henries, chinless wonders, lords and nobles, they will prostrate themselves before inherited privilege who “cannot be other than a member of the Anglican Church, can never be other than British and can never be an Indigenous person.” They’ll listen to lobbyists, they’ll hear the rent seekers, they’ll take note of the carpet baggers and grifters but they’ll continue to ignore those most deserving of a sympathetic hearing.

They don’t belong in Opposition. They belong in the discards pile of too-offensive pub trivia questions.

* * * * *

Michaelia Cash: Why Liberals won’t support Indigenous Voice to Parliament. The West Australian. Shovel this bullshit on your roses.

Supporting a YES vote. University of Melbourne.

This article was originally published on Grumpy Geezer.

 

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Labor: “Because They Don’t Give A Sh#t, Right?”

Ok, just to be clear here, I’m not writing about the lack of action on unemployment benefits. I’m saving any comments on that until after the Budget because, well, I can sort of guess how that’s going to play out. Either Labor will do nothing to raise the rate and be widely criticised for it, or they’ll raise the rate by a certain amount and be widely criticised for it. If they were to lift it by say $8 a day, many people would say that’s nothing. And while it probably isn’t enough, $8 is a lot of money to someone who doesn’t have it. If you suddenly have enough money to buy a loaf of bread, it’s a lot better than when you didn’t.

There is, of course, no Goldilocks figure, because if they were to raise it by as much as the inquiry suggested, then we’d have a plethora of cafe owners complaining that this will make it impossible for them to get workers owing to the “generous” unemployment payments.

And speaking of cafe owners, I find it surprising that none of them have been asked about the recent change that makes it possible for some people to get two months’ supply of prescription medicine at a time when it used to only be one month.

While they didn’t ask cafe owners, I did see a really interesting clip of Trent Twomey who was the Pharmacy Guild President, and he was responsible for the quote I used as a headline. The full quote was:

“And you know, it’s just been a really tough week. I’ve had Labor Party Senators and MPs take their phones of the hook because they don’t give a shit, right… I’m sorry I’m a North Queenslander and I don’t mean to swear.”

Of course, he may have very high standards of what makes a caring government. After all, the previous government generously found $2,415,000 for a pharmacy company to expand, and while this company was a third owned by Twomey’s wife, there was no conflict of interest as Mr Twomey was merely on the board that set out the criteria for the awarding of the grants, and not on the one that made the final decisions. That was a completely different group of people that just gave it to the groups that fitted the criteria that he helped create and the fact that his wife’s company did was just one of those lucky happenstances.

However, it wasn’t this, or even the fact that this LNP member was once a staffer for Warren Entsch, who just yesterday suggested that Mr Twomey should stand for the Senate rather than his seat of Leichhardt. It wasn’t even the fact he’s a North Queenslander and apparently swears without meaning to.

No, it was simply what he said in the interview that I found perplexing and I don’t just mean that idea that Labor Party people had taken their phones off the hook, which is pretty hard with a mobile phone, but would render the landlines in their offices unable to take calls from anyone.

Apparently, one single mum had got “her dad to put her house up as equity”, which raises all sorts of questions. For example, is she so poor at financial affairs that she didn’t know how to do that herself, which would suggest that her impending bankruptcy may be the result of factors other than the changes to the collection of scripts? Or does her father own her own house and if that’s the equity which enabled her to buy a pharmacy, doesn’t that mean that he’s the one who’ll be bankrupt? Or will she be homeless after the bank repossesses the house? Or… I mean the comment leads to more questions than it answers.

And then there was the 28 year old Victorian and his girlfriend who saved up for a house. They just got married and the house went up in value and “he put that up to buy his first pharmacy”. North Queenslander Twomey told us: “He’s in Victoria, he’s now bankrupt!” which is lucky because he’s gone broke he’s rung up too much debt and before the changes come in so he can sell our before the tsunami of bankrupt pharmacies put their houses on the market driving down prices… And given they managed to save up for a house before he’d even hit thirty, I’d suggest that he and wife must have good jobs which they can go back to.

Ok, it’s true that we may be talking about potential bankruptcies here, but I’d have to say that this is a strange idea coming from a potential LNP candidate. After all, we’re constantly told how people in business are taking risks and putting themselves on the line and it’s hard and that’s why they deserve a great reward when it pays off. Surely then we can’t worry when a government decision that reduces costs for a handful of people leads to the end of inefficient businesses who can’t make ends meet. Isn’t that the way capitalism’s meant to work?

Now this doesn’t mean that I don’t understand the tears of this North Queenslander who didn’t mean to swear this time, unlike a few months ago when he told us that being able “to prescribe, dispense, administer and review medicines” didn’t constitute specialities and that ‘no one gives a shit’. He didn’t say that he didn’t mean to swear that time, so I presume that he did. He also told us:

‘Currently, I can dispense all things. And I can review all things. But I cannot prescribe all things, and I cannot administer all things. I need to be able to do all four of those for all medicines for all people.’

This led to a number of medical professionals suggesting – rather unkindly – that pharmacists might have a conflict of interest in prescribing a drug when it would be better to suggest something like a specialist appointment or exercise or something non-medicinal, but that seems very cynical. Rather like when Murray Watt – a Labor senator – rudely suggested that Twomey may have had a conflict of interest when setting out the criteria that lead to a company with links to his wife getting a grant.

In my opinion, Watt was the one with the conflict of interest because he didn’t make it clear that Twomey was an LNP member and probable future candidate!

 

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