Government priorities, not immigrants, are to blame for city congestion
The announcement on 7 August that Australia’s population has hit 25 million was greeted in many quarters with a loud wailing and gnashing of teeth. There are, we are told, too many immigrants. The obsession with immigration has long been the calling card of hard-core racists, who never saw...CONTINUE READING
Gangsters for capitalism: Downer, Woodside and ‘Witness K’
It says everything you need to know about the connection between big business, politics and national security. In 2004, then foreign minister Alexander Downer presided over an Australian Secret Intelligence Service (ASIS) operation to install listening devices in the offices of the governm...CONTINUE READING
Protests used as marketing by hypocrite universities
The video starts with the words “some may find the following disturbing”. A rapid-fire montage of visceral rebellion follows. A black-clad anarchist punches neo-Nazi Richard Spencer in the face. Protesters clobber riot police shields. Palestinians fling rocks, and demonstrators flood Austr...CONTINUE READING
Banks ripping off everyone
Australia’s big financial institutions are a money-gouging oligopoly enriching senior management, board directors and shareholders while bleeding customers dry. A new report from the Productivity Commission, submitted to the government in June but only now released to the public, spells ou...CONTINUE READING
Fairfax, corporate media and a question of independence
Channel Nine’s imminent takeover of Fairfax media – publisher of the Australian Financial Review, Melbourne’s Age and the Sydney Morning Herald, among others – is the biggest development in Australian media in more than three decades. Under the newly announced merger, Nine will acquire Fai...CONTINUE READING
My Health Record a sick joke
You would be hard pressed to find an article positively recommending having a My Health Record. That’s because the government has set it up so that we all automatically get one unless we opt out. So they largely dispensed with the bother of promoting it. Do nothing, and you’re in. Even if...CONTINUE READING
Turnbull government comes a cropper on Super Saturday
Malcolm Turnbull has boasted for months about his government’s success in pushing through a right wing economic agenda, shovelling money into the hands of the well-off at the expense of the working class. Big tax cuts for big business were to be the next cab off the rank. The media have be...CONTINUE READING
Australian government lashes out over East Timor spying scandal
The Australian government has laid criminal charges against Witness K and lawyer Bernard Collaery over their exposure of the bugging of the East Timorese cabinet. The first court hearing has just been postponed until 12 September in Canberra. If the two are convicted, the maximum sentence...CONTINUE READING
Australia continues to deport asylum seekers to a country where torture is ‘routine’ and ‘systemic’
The United Nations has documented widespread torture in Sri Lanka. But the Australian government continues to deport asylum seekers to danger. UN special rapporteur Ben Emmerson’s latest human rights report, released on 23 July after he visited the country last year, concludes: “Impunity i...CONTINUE READING