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Category: Australia

  • Solomon Islands leader tells US, Australia to respect sovereignty

    The prime minister of the Solomon Islands has accused the United States and Australia of meddling in the Pacific island country’s affairs after they called for making public the police cooperation agreement it recently signed with China.

    Manasseh Sogavare returned home on Monday after a weeklong official visit to China, his second since his country switched its diplomatic recognition to Beijing from Taiwan in 2019.

    “The narrow coercive diplomatic approach of targeting China-Solomon Islands relations is unneighborly and lacks respect for established international principles under the United Nations Charter,” he told reporters at the international airport outside Honiara. “This is nothing but interference by foreign states into the internal affairs of Solomon Islands.”

    China and the Solomon Islands signed nine agreements during Sogavare’s visit, including for police cooperation. The U.S., Australia and the Solomon Islands’ opposition leader last week called for China and the Solomons to make the policing pact public, underscoring their concerns that the agreement could undermine regional stability.

    Home to about 700,000 people, the Solomon Islands has become a hotspot in the escalating Sino-U.S. competition for influence in the Pacific. It signed a secretive security pact with China last year, alarming the U.S. and its allies such as Australia, who see the agreement as a possible prelude to a Chinese military presence in the region. Neither China nor the Solomons has released the security agreement but a purported draft of it circulated online.

    Under Sogavare, the Solomon Islands has sought to benefit from the rivalry between the superpowers by securing more development assistance. The South Pacific country, an archipelago about 2,100 kilometers (1,300 miles) northeast of Brisbane, Australia, grapples with crumbling roads, limited telecommunications and lack of basic healthcare.

    Sogavare said Australia and the United States had nothing to fear from the police cooperation agreement with China. 

    It is a three-year agreement that complements the Pacific country’s police cooperation with Australia and New Zealand, he said, adding it aims to increase the police force’s capabilities and will contribute to eventual self-reliance.

    Australia led a military intervention in the Solomon Islands from 2003 to 2017 after the country descended into lawlessness and ethnic strife at the turn of the century. Australian troops returned to the country at the request of its government in late 2021, after anti-government and anti-China rioting in the capital Honiara left its Chinatown torched. 

    “The time has come for Solomon Islands to empower its police force, invest in stability and break the dependency it has on external security arrangements,” Sogavare said.

    ‘Not anyone’s backyard’

    The competition for influence in the Solomons has increasingly spilled into domestic security, raising concerns it could cause new instability.

    China and Australia have been training Solomon Islands police and donating equipment, including water cannons gifted by China and guns courtesy of Australia. In the past month, the Solomons has been given seven Nissan X-Trail SUVs from Australia as well as night-vision devices, drones, a wireless signal jammer and two vehicles from China.

    Sogavare went to China after Australia earlier this month offered to extend a military and police deployment in the Solomon Islands. The Pacific island country is preparing to host a regional sporting event later this year – bankrolled by China, Australia and Indonesia – and hold postponed elections in the first half of 2024.

    While in China, Sogavare was feted by its leaders and in turn he lavished praise on his hosts. When greeted in Beijing by Chinese officials, he said he was back home.

    In interviews with Chinese state media, he lauded China’s international diplomacy such as its “wonderful” global security initiative and said the country threatened no one.

    “All I want is for our beloved country to develop,” Sogavare said at the airport press conference.

    “For forty-five years [since independence] we’ve been left by the wayside and treated as someone else’s backyard,” he said. “We are not anyone’s backyard. We are a sovereign country and we want to be treated with respect, as equals.”

    BenarNews is an RFA-affiliated online news organization.


    This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by By Gina Maka’a for BenarNews.

    This post was originally published on Radio Free.

  • Loathsome Amiability: Why Watching Utopia Hurts

    Let’s be frank: watching Utopia hurts. It involves stinging your eyeballs, tearing your hair, and taking yourself to the ledge of a skyscraper to call the whole thing off.  The fact that the characters are meant to be faux pleasing is no excuse not to loathe them.

    This Australian satire on bureaucracy, specifically featuring the bureaucracy of infrastructure development, displays buffoonery, stupidity, and workplace retardation of hideous scale.  It is a micro snapshot of the public service and its poisonous symbiosis with the political class, an insight into virtually any modern organisation in retreat from its principles.  In it, we see the same recipe repeated across government departments, corporations, the modern failed university, and its managers.

    From 2014, Utopia had two focal points: infrastructure projects of the National Building Authority, and the employees who, in various ways, advance, retreat, and then diminish the allocated task.  Ideas struggle to be born.  In their infancy, smothering is a must.  If such ideas eventually develop legs, they will be shackled and bound.

    How this is manifested varies. It could come in the form of a feasibility study.  The outcome of that feasibility study is bound to lead to other studies, and so forth, suggesting a law of false productivity.  If changes do take place, they never progress beyond tinkering with fences or redesigning logos.  The rest is just enactment and illusion.  The projects that do eventually get realised in all their horror are the cockups, the bungles, the budget nightmares.

    The office dimension is salient in Utopia, a universe where kindly failure is celebrated.  It is the site of constipated endeavours, where the only possible momentum takes place via catering choices and the watercooler.  Where work is not actually done (there is a preference for work about work), and progress painfully slow, distractions in language and communications offer solace and salvation.  Human Resource freaks take centre stage and parade; legal advisors intervene and meddle in priestly instruction.  There is a focus on professional development, a spotlight on diet, protocols of behaviour.

    There is, however, a conscious departure in the series from brute workplace aggression and manic bullying in the manner of The Thick of It.  It is precisely this recipe that gives Utopia its self-harming appeal.  You are meant to find the characters amiable, even mildly likable.  Banish the thought.

    Rob Sitch, the director of the series who also plays the frustrated Tony Woodford, head of the NBA, puts it like this: “Utopia came along at a time when the idea of someone yelling at people in the workplace went out years ago.  So, it is all these quiet, passive-aggressive frustrations where you have got to negotiate telling people off and try to get the best out of people without actually offending anyone, especially if they are acting in good faith.”

    After four seasons, the well should have run dry, with those amiable darlings vanishing in a devastating Australian drought.  But fecundity has returned, and the landscape abloom with flourishing feeds.  Typically, the inspiration for the 2023 series comes from inauspicious, even banal origins.  Sitch had something of a revelation when stuck in roadworks on a city freeway.  “I reckon I had been driving up and down the freeway for four years through those roadworks.  I turned to someone in the car and said, this looks like it hasn’t changed.  When are they going to finish it?”

    What grates with such an otherwise superb effort – it’s not every day you can loathe the affable so easily – is its cosmic immutability, a state of affairs assisted by the characters.  Utopia is a horrific concession to such a reality, revels in it, and does so with that Australian “she’ll be right mate” disposition that can only cause despair.  Instead of brave reform and dynamic movement, there is hemmed in status quo cowardice, a cementing stasis.  To repurpose the language of the Australian historian Manning Clark, this is not the language of the enlargers but the straightening types.  It would probably be kinder to call them the straitjacketing types with thick folders of neuroses.

    It is for such reasons that the sane thinker should disagree with the following assessment in The Australian by Troy Bramston.  “It is not possible to dislike any of the characters because they are all so affable and they mean well, whether it is human resources manager Beverley Sadler (Rebecca Massey) warning of legal pitfalls dealing with the staff or Brian Collins (Jamie Robertson), responsible for security and building services, updating office equipment and making sure everyone is wearing a lanyard.”

    Utopia builds on a substantial record from Working Dog, whose credits include Frontline and the The Hollowmen.  It also strikes a similar note to The Games, which premiered in 1998 and lasted two seasons. Ironically enough, that remarkable effort prophesied catastrophe and failure at the Sydney Olympic Games, or at least a rather impoverished show.  Nothing of the sort happened, and, most unusually, the games were budgeted and paid for ahead of the event.  Oddly enough, the characters in John Clarke’s brilliant creation, showing the irreducible power of absurdity and image when bureaucracies and stage-managing meet, are rather likeable.

    Utopia is of that tradition, though it should come with a health warning for those damaged and ruined by the innumerable workspaces and agencies that operate with the cul-de-sac in mind, prizing the polite delivery of inanities over hard substance.  Many of the characters to be found in such carceral spaces are distinctly not affable and deserve to be given a generous lashing of opprobrium.


    This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Binoy Kampmark.

    This post was originally published on Radio Free.

  • How Australia can partner more effectively with France in the Pacific

    ANALYSIS: By Hugh Piper and Anna Gibert

    As geopolitics brings increasing engagement by external actors with the Pacific, there is a need to coordinate more effectively — including Australia and France.

    At the same time, better coordination must be done in a consultative and respectful manner in partnership with Pacific nations, particularly in light of Australia’s commitment to a “new era” with the region.

    In a new report by the Asia-Pacific Development, Diplomacy and Defence Dialogue (AP4D), we identify how Australia can work with France to contribute to addressing some of the Pacific’s challenges.

    To help inform our conclusions, we conducted discussions with Pacific Islanders in Vanuatu, Fiji and Tonga who have experience working with Australia and France.

    Development coordination is crucial for maximising the impact of scarce resources and ensuring that the often-limited bandwidth of Pacific governments is not overwhelmed — and that local sovereignty and perspectives are prioritised.

    Playing to the strengths of different actors, drawing on collective expertise, and avoiding duplicating or undermining respective efforts are also crucial. Donor coordination forums and conferences, greater visibility and mapping of respective contributions, alignment on diligence and compliance requirements, and dedicated resources for coordination are all ideas to explore.

    Australia and France can work together to improve coordination, alongside other actors including the US, New Zealand, Japan, European institutions, and multilateral development banks. While yet to demonstrate its practical value fully, the Partners in the Blue Pacific initiative promises to perform such a function — though France and the EU are only observers, and it has received a mixed reception in the Pacific.

    Maritime domain awareness
    Australia should ensure that the grouping remains open to, and engaged with, France as much as possible. The first substantial focus area for Partners in the Blue Pacific is illegal, unreported and unregulated fishing, and it is important for France to remain engaged, given its substantial exclusive economic zones in the Pacific and capacity to contribute to maritime domain awareness.

    At the same time, consultations in the Pacific also noted the risk for Australia in working too closely with France and EU institutions, as this may lead to a reduction in the responsiveness for which Australia is highly valued. Engaging with, and accessing funding from, the EU is widely seen to be onerous, highly bureaucratic and operationally decontextualised.

    Australia must also confront in frank terms the risks of working with France in the Pacific. It needs to grapple with the complexity of relationships with New Caledonia and French Polynesia and how they engage in forums such as the Pacific Islands Forum on essentially the same terms as sovereign nations, even though key policy domains including foreign relations remain under Paris’s purview.

    Australia needs to be cognisant of how perspectives can diverge between overseas and metropolitan France and sensitively navigate this complexity.

    In parts of the region, people express resentment and distrust driven by France’s nuclear testing, colonial history, and ongoing sovereignty over parts of the Pacific. Developments in recent years around New Caledonia’s status, especially the 2021 independence referendum, have added to this.

    Pacific voices saw France’s approach in the Pacific as more top-down, with less engagement with local needs and preferences when compared to Australia’s agenda, which is increasingly focused on localisation and sustainability. A widely held perception of lower French cultural and linguistic competency in the Pacific further hinders this.

    Moreover, the wider context of the Australian government’s push towards a First Nations foreign policy, and its willingness to speak openly about the legacy of colonialism in the Indo-Pacific, must be considered in the context of engaging France in the Pacific.

    Reputational risk
    There is a reputational risk for Australia were it to be conspicuously inactive on indigenous issues with respect to the French territories while engaging with such issues elsewhere.

    While it is clear that the Australian government intends to remain neutral on the future status of French territories, it must be cognisant of, and proactive in, managing these risks while at the same time maintaining a close relationship with metropolitan France.

    One way of doing this is to continue to foster positive people-to-people links with Indigenous people in French Pacific territories. This would build on existing work in New Caledonia, for instance, to establish cultural and artistic links with First Nations Australians and to share indigenous knowledge on land management.

    Expanding the Pacific Australia Labour Mobility scheme to New Caledonians and offering scholarships, similar to Australia Awards, to people in New Caledonia and French Polynesia could also help boost links with Australia.

    Such initiatives are a low-risk way of engaging Indigenous people in French territories without undermining Australia’s neutrality on questions of sovereignty and independence. They would also demonstrate Australia actively boosting the status of Indigenous people in French territories and delivering on its First Nations foreign policy approach.

    Pacific voices told us that humanitarian assistance and disaster relief (HADR) is the most advanced area of Australia-France coordination (through the tripartite FRANZ Arrangement), demonstrated by recent responses to natural disasters in Vanuatu, Tonga, and Fiji.

    Such responses, however, could be improved with deeper local political economy analysis and consultation with local people and structures. Australia and France should also seek to derive lessons from HADR to inform coordination in other sectors.

    Cooperation presence
    Consultations identified that France had the most consistent and visible development cooperation presence (outside its own territories) in Vanuatu. However, in both Vanuatu and across the region more broadly, it was seen that there is significant scope for Australia and France to coordinate more effectively.

    Greater dialogue, information sharing, planning and consultation with local leaders and systems should be prioritised in-country to increase aggregated investment effectiveness. A clear commitment to coordination by Australia and France would also mitigate “donor overcrowding” and help manage the workload of Pacific bureaucracies.

    Indeed, it would be to Australia and France’s credit to lead increased coordination as “responsible donors”. Pacific voices across the region identified several areas where joint work between Australia and France could be beneficial, including support for local media and civil society, advancing gender equality, sports development, education (especially in Vanuatu given its bilingual school system), and infrastructure (especially attracting EU finance).

    Australia should generally support a greater French development contribution throughout the Pacific. Naturally, any joint work or coordination should be driven by the policy settings of Pacific nations and developed in consultation with the Pacific leaders.

    In doing so, the language and ethos of the Blue Pacific Continent should be employed.

    The French development agency, AFD, is likely to increase its contribution in the Pacific, focused on infrastructure, environment, oceans and climate resilience. There are, however, almost no established patterns of coordination between Australia and France in the Pacific on development.

    There are substantial barriers to joint work on development projects by Australia and France, given unfamiliar bureaucracies, different languages, different ways of working, and different approaches to financing. Feasible bilateral cooperation is most likely to be in the form of discrete contributions, such as co-financing by one donor on a project predominately managed by the other.

    Increasing contributions
    Australia could consider increasing its contribution to the French-run Kiwa Initiative, and France could build on its current volunteer investment into the Australian-funded Vanuatu Skills Partnership. There could also be scope for France to direct its development finance through the Australian Infrastructure Financing Facility for the Pacific.

    Bilateral coordination mechanisms and regular dialogue between Australian and French officials should be established as soon as possible, including by finalising a letter of intent between DFAT and AFD.

    Effective communication between Canberra and Paris, as well as in-country between Australian and French diplomatic posts and with Pacific governments, will be important to operationalise this intent meaningfully.

    More broadly, Australia should encourage France to direct its development contributions in the Pacific through NGOs, civil society organisations, multilateral institutions, and proven Australian-funded initiatives that support local leadership and have local legitimacy, in line with its First Nations foreign policy approach and localisation agenda.

    Hugh Piper is programme lead of the Asia-Pacific Development, Diplomacy & Defence Dialogue (AP4D). Anna Gibert is an independent consultant who provides strategic support to a number of locally led DFAT investments in the Pacific. This article is republished from the ANU Development Policy Centre’s DevPolicy Blog under a Creative Commons licence.


    This content originally appeared on Asia Pacific Report and was authored by APR editor.

    This post was originally published on Radio Free.

  • Australia bags deal to export 100 Boxer 8×8 vehicles to Germany

    The Australia government has agreed to a major defence export deal with Germany and signed an in-principle agreement for Australia to supply more than 100 Boxer 8×8 Heavy Weapon Carrier vehicles, the Australian Department of Defence (DoD) announced on 10 July. The agreement was signed by Ambassador to Germany Philip Green and German Federal Ministry […]

    The post Australia bags deal to export 100 Boxer 8×8 vehicles to Germany appeared first on Asian Military Review.

    This post was originally published on Asian Military Review.

  • Why The Most Urgent Need, in Order to Prevent WW III, Is to End All Military Alliances Now

    World Wars I and II were contests between empires, and so America’s President Franklin Delano Roosevelt (FDR) was determined that after WW II, all empires would be outlawed and all international relations (between nations) would be controlled only by a global all-inclusive federation of nations, which in 1941 he referred to would be called “the United Nations” and which would exclusively possess the Executive, Legislative, and Juridical, powers and authorities  — to make and enforce the international laws that would be created by that international Legislature of all nations, subject to that Supreme Court which would interpret that Legislature’s constitution or “Charter” for this global government between nations, and which would be enforced by that international Executive. All strategic weaponry would be owned and under the control of that Executive and none other. This was FDR’s plan to replace empires and world wars, by creating the world’s first democratic federation of all nations, which would supersede and replace any and all empires.

    On 25 July 1945, FDR’s immediate successor Harry Truman, became convinced by two imperialists whom he deeply respected, Winston Churchill and Dwight Eisenhower, to reject that plan by FDR, which plan Truman didn’t even know about but only inferred might have existed and been FDR’s plan. In any case, Truman secretly despised FDR, and replaced his entire Cabinet within two years, so that he (instead of FDR) would shape the post-WW-II world.

    The first-ever military alliance was created by Truman (under the guidance of Eisenhower, Churchill, James Byrnes and others) in order to carry out his plan for ultimate global conquest. A “military alliance” is a military contract between nations that is legally binding between them by a provision in it that says an invasion against any one of them will be an invasion against all of them and will automatically place each one of them into a state of war against that invader. It is unlike all prior empires because it is by contract instead of by exigency. Unlike in World Wars One and Two, in neither of which, the empires or coalition of empires that were waging war against each other were subject to any overriding pre-signed contract amongst them, the U.S. Government in 1949 created the world’s very first military alliance by contract, NATO, and many of the signatories to or members of that contract didn’t know when they signed it that they were thereby committing their nation to relying upon the U.S. Government to determine their foreign policies, which would be enforced by the U.S. military — they didn’t know that they were thereby becoming vassal-nations or colonies of an entirely new TYPE of empire: a military alliance by contract, instead of merely by exigency (such as had been the case in WW I & WW II).

    This was an entirely new phenomenon in world affairs, and it is increasingly forcing the world’s nations to either comply with whatever the demands by the U.S. Government are, or else to potentially become victimized by the U.S. and its ‘allies’, such as Germany did when the U.S. Government arranged for the Russo-German-owned Nord Stream fuel pipelines from Russia to Germany and the rest of the EU, to become blown-up and destroyed (which was an act of war by the U.S. Government against both Russia and Germany, Germany being itself a member-nation in NATO and therefore having no recourse against it).

    When the Nord Stream pipelines were blown-up, Germany could not rely upon the NATO Treaty to protect itself against that invader because the invader in that instance was the U.S. Government, the virtual owner of NATO; and, furthermore, the U.S. Government has 231 military bases in Germany; so, Germany’s Government was powerless to resist in any way — verbally or otherwise.

    The world’s second military alliance was the Warsaw Pact, which was created on 14 May 1955 by the Soviet Union in direct response to the U.S. Government’s contemptuous rejection of the Soviet Union’s secret request on 22 April 1954 to Eisenhower, to be considered for possible admission into NATO. That rejection was the moment when Khrushchev recognized to a certainty that the U.S. Government was determined to conquer the Soviet Union, no matter what concessions the Soviet Union might make. Whereas in the NATO treaty, its Article 5 is the core, the core in the Warsaw Pact treaty is its Article 4, which is equivalent to it. Whereas the Warsaw Pact agreement became terminated in 1991 on the basis of verbal promises not to expand the alliance, which the U.S. Government and its allies had made in 1990 to the Soviet Government, all of which turned out all to have been lies that were controlled by U.S. President GHW Bush, the NATO agreement remained in force and even doubled its membership after the Warsaw Pact ended.

    The world’s third military alliance is the AUKUS Treaty, this being a secret treaty (thus even worse than the NATO Treaty, which was not a secret agreement) by which the U.S. and its UK partner created a new military alliance, between Australia, UK, and U.S., but this time against China, instead of against Russia. There have been efforts by the U.S. Government to get its NATO military alliance to include the leading nations in the areas of the Pacific and Indian Oceans to join NATO, but NATO’s France has thus-far blocked that. Apparently, if the U.S. Government is determined to force WW III to start in Asia-Pacific, then the military alliance will have to be based on the secret AUKUS agreement, not on the public NATO agreement.

    In order for AUKUS to avoid being criticized on account of the non-publication of the treaty, a Web-search for such phrases as “AUKUS text” produces subsidiary documents such as this, instead of the actual document, and this is done in order to deceive researchers to think that it’s not even a military alliance at all (and in that linked-to example, it’s only an agreement about technological cooperation, which doesn’t even mention “China” nor have any mutual-‘defense’ clause in it). They’re treating researchers as fools.

    Consequently, there now are two military alliances, NATO against Russia, and AUKUS against China, and both of them are intended ultimately to conquer the entire world with the participation of America’s ‘allies’ or colonies.

    To the extent that either of these military alliances succeeds, there will be a Third World War; and, so, now, all nations of the world are implicitly being challenged, either to join the U.S. to conquer Russia and China; or, else, to say no to the U.S. Government, and to demand that it reverse what it did and for it to participate with other nations to institute the changes that must be made to the U.N.’s Charter in order to transform that into what FDR had been intending; or, else, for all decent nations to create together a replacement of Truman’s U.N., so that the U.S. Government will become isolated in its aim to win a WW III, and there will instead become the type of world that FDR had been hoping would follow after WW II — a world that would NOT produce another World War..

    Conceptually, the issue here is between the Truman-installed win-lose plan for the future (which is no basic change from the past), versus a win-win plan for the future, which is what FDR and the Governments in both Russia and China have been advocating for but no one is doing anything to help actually bring about. Ironically, the Truman plan would actually be lose-lose, because any WW III would destroy this entire planet. But it’s the direction we are heading toward.

    It’s important to understand that though FDR invented and came up with the fundamental principles for his planned “United Nations,” it was Truman right after FDR’s 12 April 1945 death who basically controlled the San Francisco Conference, during 25 April to 26 June 1945 and the text that it wrote for the U.N.’s Charter. We got Truman’s U.N. — not FDR’s.

    Also ironically, the Truman pathway we are on, toward that result, is the opposite of “democracy” though is claimed to epitomize democracy. For example: just consider the ridiculousness of the AUKUS contract being a SECRET treaty among self-proclaimed ‘democracies’. Then add to this the fact that the secret treaty is a preparation for a WW III that would start in Asia against China instead of in Europe (which had been the main battleground in both of the first two World Wars) and against Russia. So: its presumption is that the world’s publics will quietly be shepherded into WW II on the basis of — among other lies — a secret treaty, the one that created the world’s second military alliance and that isn’t even criticized for its being a secret (and extremely dangerous) treaty among ‘democracies’. Lies can kill the world.

    These are the reasons why both NATO and AUKUS must be disbanded, just like the Warsaw Pact was. Either that, or else we’ll have WW III.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • US, Australia call for China-Solomons police pact to be made public

    The United States, Australia and the Solomon Islands opposition leader have called for China and the Solomon Islands government to make public a police cooperation agreement they signed this week, underscoring concerns the pact could undermine regional stability.

    Solomon Islands Prime Minister Manasseh Sogavare is on his second official visit to China since his government switched its diplomatic recognition to Beijing from Taiwan in 2019. A police cooperation pact was among nine agreements signed by the two countries in Beijing on Monday, where Chinese leaders feted Sogavare and promised further aid to the economically-lagging island nation.

    “In general, we have concerns over the expansion of [China’s] internal security and surveillance apparatus beyond its own borders,” a Papua New Guinea-based spokesman for the U.S. embassy in the Solomon Islands said Thursday.  

    “We encourage the parties to release these texts immediately to increase transparency and inform discussions about the impacts of these agreements on regional security,” the spokesman said in an email to BenarNews. 

    The Solomon Islands, home to about 700,000 people, has become a hotspot in the escalating China-U.S. competition for influence in the Pacific. It signed a secretive security pact with China last year, alarming the U.S. and its allies such as Australia, who see the agreement as a possible prelude to a Chinese military presence in the region.

    Under Sogavare, the Solomon Islands has sought to benefit from the China-U.S. rivalry by securing more development assistance. The South Pacific country, an archipelago about 2,100 kilometers (1,300 miles) northeast of Brisbane, Australia, grapples with crumbling roads, limited telecommunications and lack of basic healthcare. 

    Solomon Islands opposition leader Matthew Wale said Sogavare’s government must release all nine agreements it signed with China. 

    Some ministers in Sogavare’s Cabinet had not been aware of the scope of the agreements that would be signed with China’s government, Wale said.

    “Solomon Islands is on its own in the region in the speed and breath in which it is concluding these agreements,” he said in a statement. 

    Wong.JPG
    Australian Foreign Minister Penny Wong attends a meeting in Jakarta, Indonesia on July 12, 2023. Credit: Reuters

    China’s Foreign Ministry spokesman Wang Wenbin said Wednesday the policing agreement is consistent with international law and common practice.

    Law enforcement cooperation with China has “played a positive role in promoting security and stability of the Solomon Islands,” he told a regular ministry press conference.

    The competition for influence in the Solomons has increasingly spilled into domestic security, raising concerns it could cause new instability in a country that spiraled into chaos only two decades ago, culminating in an Australian-led military intervention from 2003 until 2017.

    China and Australia have been training Solomon Islands police and donating equipment, including water cannons gifted by China and guns courtesy of Australia. In the past month, the Solomons has been given seven Nissan X-Trail SUVs from Australia as well as night-vision devices, drones, a wireless signal jammer and two vehicles from China.

    Sogavare’s trip to China comes after Australia earlier this month offered to extend a military and police deployment in the Solomon Islands. The Pacific island country is preparing to host a regional sporting event later this year – bankrolled by China, Australia and Indonesia – and hold postponed elections in the first half of 2024. 

    Australia sent more than 200 troops and police to the Solomon Islands in late 2021 at the request of Sogavare’s government following anti-China and anti-government riots in the capital Honiara.

    Australia’s Foreign Minister Penny Wong said there is an understanding among Pacific island nations and Australia and New Zealand that security in the region is best provided by the region itself, and managed through diplomatic organizations such as the Pacific Islands Forum.

    “That matters for stability. So, Australia, like many others, would want transparency about what this agreement means and we would want it discussed at the Pacific Islands Forum,” she said at a press conference in Jakarta on Wednesday. 

    The U.S. and Papua New Guinea signed a defense cooperation agreement in May that would give U.S. forces extensive use of six ports and airports in the Pacific island country. Critics of the pact said it could undermine Papua New Guinea’s sovereignty.  

    The agreement has been tabled in Papua New Guinea’s parliament and would be published on the State Department’s website when it comes into force. 

    BenarNews is an RFA-affiliated online news organization.


    This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by By Stephen Wright for BenarNews.

    This post was originally published on Radio Free.

  • Vietnam Frees Australian democracy activist Chau Van Kham

    On 11 July 2023 EFE reported that Vietnam had released Vietnamese-Australian activist Chau Van Kham, sentenced in 2019 to 12 years in prison for extremism over his ties to the Viet Tan pro-democratic party.

    Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese said he “very much welcomes the release of Chau,” in remarks Monday from Berlin, through Australian public broadcaster ABC.

    Chau’s lawyer Dan Nguyen said in a statement through Amnesty International Australia that the activist, who returned Monday night to Australia, is with his wife and two sons. He also thanked the government’s, organizations and individuals’ efforts that fought for his release.

    Chau was arrested in Ho Chi Minh City in January 2019 after being accused of entering the country with a false document and sentenced in an express trial to 12 years in prison for extremism charges 10 months later. See: https://humanrightsdefenders.blog/2020/06/08/chau-van-kham-australian-human-rights-defender-disappeared-inside-vietnams-prison-system/

    This was due to Chau, 73, being linked to pro-democratic group Viet Tan, considered an extremist entity in the country but a human rights organization in Australia.

    Deputy Australian Prime Minister Richard Marles said Chau was released on “humanitarian” reasons and “in the spirit of friendship which exists between Australia and Vietnam,” according to ABC.

    Chau is one of “more than 150 political activists in Vietnam who have been detained for peaceful acts in favor of freedom of expression,” Human Rights Watch Asia Human Rights Director Elaine Pearson said in a statement.

    Pearson spoke of journalist Dang Dihn Bach and activists Mai Phan Loi, Dang Dinh Bach, and Hoang Thi Minh Hong among them and urged Australia to continue advocating for their release.

    The exact number of political prisoners in Vietnam is unknown, as numbers provided by different human rights organizations have discrepancies.

    While Human Rights Watch says the total exceeds 150, Amnesty International said there were 128 political prisoners in the country last year. Dissident organization Defend the Defenders raised the number to more than 250.

    Vietnam Frees Australian pro-democracy activist

    This post was originally published on Hans Thoolen on Human Rights Defenders and their awards.

  • West Papua solidarity group protests over arrest of 10 KNPB members

    Asia Pacific Report

    An Australian advocacy group for West Papua self-determination has condemned yesterday’s arrest by Indonesian security forces of 10 West Papua National Committee (KNPB) members.

    The activists were arrested “simply because they were handing out leaflets informing people of a rally to be held today” to show support for West Papua becoming a full member of the Melanesian Spearhead Group (MSG), said the Australia West Papua Association (AWPA) in a statement.

    The security forces detained the activists and took them to the Jayapura Resort Police station in Sentani for questioning.

    They were eventually released after being detained for eight hours.

    It was reported that the police were threatening the KNPB activists and asking therm to make a statement not to carry out West Papuan independence struggle activities.

    “Yet again we have peaceful activists arrested for simply handing out leaflets about an upcoming rally, which is their right to do under the UN’s Universal Declaration of Human Rights,” said Joe Collins of AWPA:

    Article 19
    Everyone has the right to freedom of opinion and expression; this right includes freedom to hold opinions without interference and to seek, receive and impart information and ideas through any media and regardless of frontiers.

    Article 20
    1. Everyone has the right to freedom of peaceful assembly and association.

    “Hopefully any rallies that take place today will be allowed to go ahead peacefully and there will not be a repeat of the brutal crackdowns that occurred at other peaceful rallies in the past.”

    The Melanesian Spearhead Group is due to meet in Port Vila, Vanuatu, this month, although the dates have not yet been announced.

    The MSG consists of Fiji, Papua New Guinea, Solomon Islands, Vanuatu and the Kanak and Socialist National Liberation Front (FLNKS) of Kanaky (New Caledonia).

    West Papua has observer status while Indonesia has associate membership and Jakarta has been conducting an intense diplomatic lobbying with MSG members over recent months.

    The United Liberation Movement of West Papua (ULMWP) has applied for full membership.

    This content originally appeared on Asia Pacific Report and was authored by APR editor.

  • An Accident Waiting to Happen: NATO Looks to Asia

    Since the end of the Cold War, the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation has distinctly strayed from its original purpose.  It has become, almost shamelessly, the vessel and handmaiden of US power, while its burgeoning expansion eastwards has done wonders to upend the applecart of stability.

    From that upending, the alliance started bungling.  It engaged, without the authorisation of the UN Security Council, in a 78-day bombing campaign of Yugoslavia – at least what was left of it – ostensibly to protect the lives of Kosovar Albanians.  Far from dampening the tinderbox, the Kosovo affair continues to be an explosion in the making.

    Members of the alliance also expended material, money and personnel in Afghanistan over the course of two decades, propping up a deeply unpopular, corrupt regime in Kabul while failing to stifle the Taliban.  As with previous imperial projects, the venture proved to be a catastrophic failure.

    In 2011, NATO again was found wanting in its attack on the regime of Muammar Gaddafi.   While it was intended to be an exemplar of the Responsibility to Protect Doctrine, the intervention served to eventually topple the doomed Colonel Gaddafi, precipitating the de-facto partitioning of Libya and endangering the very civilians the mission was meant to protect.  A continent was thereby destabilised.  The true beneficiaries proved to be the tapestry of warring rebel groups characterised by sectarian impulses and a voracious appetite for human rights abuses and war crimes.

    The Ukraine War has been another crude lesson in the failings of the NATO project.  The constant teasing and wooing of Kyiv as a potential future member never sat well with Moscow and while much can be made of the Russian invasion, no realistic assessment of the war’s origins can excise NATO from playing a deep, compromised role.

    The alliance is also proving dissonant among its members.  Not all are exactly jumping at the chance of admitting Ukraine.  German diplomats have revealed that they will block any current moves to join the alliance.  Even that old provoking power, the United States, is not entirely sure whether doors should be open to Kyiv.  On CNN, President Joe Biden expressed the view that he did not “think it’s ready for membership of NATO.”  To qualify, Ukraine would have to meet a number of “qualifications” from “democratisation to a whole range of other issues.”  While hardly proving very alert during the interview (at one point, he confused Ukraine with Russia) he did draw the logical conclusion that bringing Kyiv into an alliance of obligatory collective defence during current hostilities would automatically put NATO at war with Moscow.

    With such a spotty, blood speckled record marked by stumbles and bungles, any suggestions of further engagement by the alliance in other areas of the globe should be treated with abundant wariness.  The latest talk of further Asian engagement should also be greeted with a sense of dread.  According to a July 7 statement, “The Indo-Pacific is important for the Alliance, given that developments in that region can directly affect Euro-Atlantic security.  Moreover, NATO and its partners in the region share a common goal of working together to strengthen the rules-based international order.”  With these views, conflict lurks.

    The form of that engagement is being suggested by such ideas as opening a liaison office in Japan, intended as the first outpost in Asia.  It also promises to feature in the NATO summit to take place in Vilnius on July 11 and 12, which will again repeat the attendance format of the Madrid summit held in 2022.  That new format – featuring the presence of Australia, Japan, New Zealand and South Korea, or the AP4, should have induced much head scratching.  But the Australian Strategic Policy Institute, Washington’s beady eyes in Canberra, celebrated this “shift to taking a truly global approach to strategic competition”.

    NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg is also much in favour of such competition, warning member states of Beijing’s ambitions.  “We should not make the same mistake with China and other authoritarian regimes,” he suggested, alluding to a dangerous and flawed comparison between Ukraine and Taiwan.  “What is happening in Europe today could happen in Asia tomorrow.”

    One of the prominent headscratchers at this erroneous reasoning is French President Emmanuel Macron.  Taking issue with setting up the Japan liaison office, Macron has expressed opposition to such expansion by an alliance which, at least in terms of treaty obligations, has a strict geographical limit.  In the words of an Elysée Palace official, “As far as the office is concerned, the Japanese authorities themselves have told us that they are not extremely attached to it.”  With a headmaster’s tone, the official went on to give journalists an elementary lesson.  “NATO means North Atlantic Treaty Organization.”  The centrality of Articles 5 and 6 of the alliance were “geographic” in nature.

    In 2021, Macron made it clear that NATO’s increasingly obsessed approach with China as a dangerous belligerent entailed a confusion of goals.  “NATO is a military organisation, the issue of our relationship with China isn’t just a military issue.  NATO is an organisation that concerns the North Atlantic, China has little to do with the North Atlantic.”

    Such views have also pleased former Australian Prime Minister Paul Keating, whose waspish ire has also been trained on the NATO Secretary-General.  In his latest statement, Stoltenberg was condemned as “the supreme fool” of “the international stage”. “Stoltenberg by instinct and policy, is simply an accident on its way to happen”. In thinking that “China should be superintended by the West and strategically circumscribed”, the NATO official had overlooked the obvious point that the country “represents twenty percent of humanity and now possesses the largest economy in the world … and has no record for attacking other states, unlike the United States, whose bidding Stoltenberg is happy to do”.

    The record of this ceramic breaking bloc speaks for itself.  In its post-Cold War visage, the alliance has undermined its own mission to foster stability, becoming Washington’s axe, spear and spade.  Where NATO goes, war is most likely.  Countries of the Indo-Pacific, take note.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • OECD Secretly Lobbied Against Law Requiring Corporations to Disclose Tax Records

    The Financial Times confirmed Friday that the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development lobbied Australia to weaken a law that would have compelled about 2,500 highly profitable multinational corporations to reveal where they pay taxes, eliciting outrage from tax justice advocates. Citing two unnamed people familiar with the discussions, FT reported that the Paris-based club of wealthy…

    Source

  • The Robodebt Rogues Gallery

    If ever there was an instance of such a hideous failing in government policy and its cowardly implementation by the public service, Australia’s cruel, inept and vicious Robodebt program would have to be one of them.

    Robodebt was a scheme developed by the Department of Human Services (DHS) and submitted as a budget measure by the then Minister for Social Services, Scott Morrison, in 2015.  Its express purpose: to recover claimed overpayments from welfare recipients stretching back to the 2010-11 financial year.  The automated scheme used a deeply flawed “income averaging” method to assess income and benefit entitlements, yielding inaccurate results.  Vitally, the assumption there was that recipients had stable income through the financial year.  The scheme also failed to comply with the income calculation provisions of the Social Security Act 1991 (Cth).

    The results were disastrous for the victims in receipt of crude, harrying debt notices.  The scheme induced despair and mental ruin.  It led to various instances of suicide.  It saw a concerted government assault on the poor and vulnerable.  A remorseless campaign was waged by such unwholesome types as the former human services minister, Alan Tudge, ever keen to libel the undeserving.  Media outlets such as A Current Affair were more than happy to provide platforms for the demonising effort.  “We will find you,” he told the program, “we will track you down, and you will have to repay those debts, and you may end up in prison.”

    The grotesque policy eventually caught the ire of the courts, which ruled the scheme unlawful.  That, along with a change in government, eventually led to the establishment of a Royal Commission, whose findings by Commissioner Catherine Holmes were released on July 7.  They make for grim reading.

    While it will take time to wade through a report running over 1,000 pages, it is fitting to single out a few of the rogues who played starring roles of lasting infamy in the robodebt drama.  Who better to start with than the former Prime Minister, Scott Morrison, whose relationship with the truth continues to be strained and estranged.

    In December 2014, Morrison was appointed Minister for Social Services.  He immediately wanted to impress with his promised scalping of alleged welfare cheats and scroungers.  Wishing to make an impression he, unusually, held direct meetings with the secretary of the DHS, Kathryn Campbell, to tease out what would become the robodebt proposal.  Concern from legal officers and senior staff within the Department of Social Services (DSS) about the legal compliance of the program were ignored or dismissed.

    The Commission duly rejected “as untrue Mr Morrison’s evidence that he was told that income averaging as contemplated in the Executive Minute was an established practice and a ‘foundational way’ in which DHS worked.”  The New Policy Proposal (NPP) that arose was utterly at odds with the legal position of the Department of Social Services stating that legislative change was required to implement the new income averaging approach.

    Morrison assiduously ignored making any inquiries as to the reasons for that reversal.  He “allowed Cabinet to be misled because he did not make that obvious inquiry.” The necessary information – that the scheme would require legislative and policy change to permit the use of income averaging – was not supplied.  He accordingly “failed to meet his ministerial responsibility … to ensure that [the scheme] was lawful.”

    Tudge comes in for special mention for the “use of information about social security recipients in the media”.  This could only be regarded as an abuse of power.  After knowing that the scheme had claimed the lives of at least two people from suicide, the minister also “failed to undertake a comprehensive review of the Scheme, including its fundamental features, or to consider whether its impacts were so harmful to vulnerable recipients that it should cease.”

    Christian Porter, who also occupied the position of Minister for Social Services, “could not rationally have been satisfied of the legality of the Scheme on the basis of his general knowledge of the NPP 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.”

    The government services minister holding the robodebt reins in its final days also cuts a less than impressive figure.  In Stuart Robert’s mind, he was a moral man coming late to a policy he wished to end, despite praising it publicly and using false figures.  The Commission found that Robert had not unequivocally instructed the secretary of human services in November 2019 “to cease income averaging as a sole or partial basis for debt raising.”  It was “reasonable to suppose that Mr Robert still hoped to salvage the Robodebt Scheme in some respects.”

    The public service, supposedly famed for providing the frank and fearless advice treasured by ministers, also yields its clownish and cowardly rogues.  The officers of the DSS and DHS, the Commissioner finds, failed to give Morrison “frank and full advice before and after the development of the NPP”, the result of “pressure to deliver the budget expectations of the government and by Mr Morrison, as the Minister for Social Services, communicating the direction to develop the NPP through the Executive Minute.”

    Kathryn Campbell, Secretary of the DHS, is a true standout.  “Her response to staff concerns, including those about income averaging and debt accuracy, was not to seek external assurance, or even to make inquiries about the matter with her chief counsel or other departmental lawyers.”  What took place, instead, was a communication on January 25, 2017 to staff that there would be “no change to how we assess income or calculate and recover debts”.

    The DHS also receives a stinging rebuke in its approach to the media’s coverage of the scheme’s evident defects.  In 2017, when robodebt came under withering scrutiny, the department responded “to criticism by systematically repeating the same narrative, underpinned by a set of talking points and standard lines.”  The policy of bureaucrats was to act as “gatekeepers” keen on “getting it [the media criticism] shut down as quickly as possible”.

    The names of the robodebt architects and apologists should be blazoned upon a monument of execration for time immemorial.  Even now, its perpetrators are resorting to extravagant acts of hand washing, gleefully claiming they have not been named as subjects of potential criminal or civil prosecution.  Campbell, in a time-honoured tradition showing that gross failure rewards, continues to receive money from an advisory role in the Defence Department specific to implementing the AUKUS security alliance with the United States and the United Kingdom.

    The opposition leader, Peter Dutton, can only concede that “mistakes” had been made.  Labor’s Minister for Government Services, Bill Shorten, had “politicised” the issue.  But for the string of coalition governments whose existence only came to an end in May 2022, the politics and ideology of punishing welfare recipients remained central and, in the end, pathological.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • Palestine a testing ground for Israeli ‘occupation war tech’, says author

    Antony Loewenstein
    Investigative journalist Antony Loewenstein . . . author of The Palestine Laboratory. Image: AL website

    Asia Pacific Report:
    Locations
    Monday, July 17: Christchurch
    Public meeting, 7pm
    Knox Centre, Cnr Bealey Avenue & Victoria street, Christchurch (books available)
    https://www.facebook.com/events/813719740268177/

    Tuesday, July 18: Wellington
    7pm
    St Andrews on the Terrace, 30 The Terrace (Unity Books will have a rep there)
    https://www.facebook.com/events/644521054258279/

    Wednesday, July 19: Hawkes Bay
    8pm
    Greenmeadows Community Hall, 83 Tait Drive, Napier
    https://www.facebook.com/events/6474977775923813/

    Thursday, July 20: Auckland
    Public Meeting, 7pm
    The Fickling Centre, 546 Mt Albert Road (The Women’s Bookshop will be at the meeting to sell books)
    https://www.facebook.com/events/285795137317711/


    TRT World News interviews Antony Loewenstein on this week’s Israeli attack on Jenin refugee camp.

  • Australian Army AS9 howitzer development attains new milestone

    During trials the Australian Army’s new AS9 Huntsman 155 mm/52 calibre self-propelled howitzer (SPH) has reached a new milestone, with the latest evolution having test-fired three artillery rounds at a government testing facility in South Korea, the Australian Department of Defence (DoD) announced in a news release on 4 July. The DoD said the latest […]

    The post Australian Army AS9 howitzer development attains new milestone appeared first on Asian Military Review.

    This post was originally published on Asian Military Review.

  • Author condemns Canberra ‘collusion’ with Jakarta on West Papua atrocities

    Asia Pacific Report

    An Australian human rights author and poet has accused successive federal governments of “deliberately aiding and abetting” the 1969 annexation of West Papua by Indonesia and enabling the “stifling” of the Melanesian people’s right to self-determination.

    In reaffirming his appeal last May for a royal commission into Australia’s policies over West Papua, author and activist Jim Aubrey alleged Canberra had been a party to “criminal actions” over the Papuan right to UN decolonisation.

    In a damning letter to Governor-General David Hurley, Aubrey — author-editor of the 1998 book Free East Timor: Australia’s culpability in East Timor’s genocide, also about Indonesian colonialism — has appealed for the establishment of a royal commission to examine the Australian federal government’s “role as a criminal accessory to Indonesia’s illegal annexation of West Papua and as an accomplice” to more than six decades of “crimes against humanity” in the region.

    Author and activist Jim Aubrey
    Author and activist Jim Aubrey . . . “Indonesian thugs and terrorists wanted the Australian government’s
    collusion … and the Australian government provided it.” Image: Jim Aubrey

    Aubrey’s statement was issued today marking the 25th anniversary of the Biak massacre when at least eight pro-independence protesters were killed and a further 32 bodies were washed up on the shores of Biak island.

    The killings were – like many others in West Papua – were carried out with impunity. Papuan human rights groups claim the Biak death toll was actually 150.

    In his document, Aubrey has also accused the Australian government of “maliciously destroying” in 2014 prima facie photographic evidence of the 1998 Biak massacre.

    “At the request of the Indonesian government in 1969, the Australian government prevented West Papuan political leaders from travelling to the United Nations in New York City to appeal for assistance to the members of the General Assembly,” Aubrey claimed.

    “They wanted to tell the honourable members of the UN General Assembly that the Indonesian military occupation force was murdering West Papuan men.

    ‘Crimes against humanity’
    “They wanted to tell the honourable members of the UN General Assembly that the Indonesian military occupation force was raping West Papuan women.

    “These crimes against humanity were being committed to stifle West Papua’s cry for
    freedom as a universal right of the UN decolonisation process.

    “Indonesian thugs and terrorists wanted the Australian government’s
    collusion … and the Australian government provided it.”

    The 68-page open letter to Australian Governor-General David Hurley
    The 68-page open letter to Australian Governor-General David Hurley appealing for a royal commission into Canberra’s conduct . . . an indictment of Indonesian atrocities in West Papua. Image: Screenshot APR

    Aubrey has long been a critic of the Australian government over its handling of the West Papua issue and has spoken out in support of the West Papua Movement – OPM.

    In a separate statement today about the Biak massacre, OPM leader Jeffrey Bomanak called on Papua New Guinean Prime Minister James Marape to “remember his Melanesian heritage and his Papuan brothers and sisters’ war of liberation against Indonesia’s illegal invasion and occupation of half of the island of New Guinea”.

    Bomanak also appealed to Marape to press for the “safe-keeping and welfare” of New Zealand hostage pilot Philip Mehrtens during his meeting with Indonesian President Joko Widodo today.

    Mehrtens has been held captive by West Papuan pro-independence rebels in the Papuan highlands rainforests since February 7. The rebels demand negotiations on independence .

    ‘150 massacred’
    “On July 6, 1998, over 600 Indonesian defence and security forces tortured, mutilated and massacred 150 West Papuan people for raising the West Papuan flag and peacefully protesting for independence,” said Bomanak in his statement.

    “No one has ever been brought to justice for the Biak massacre.”

    About the Australian government’s alleged concealment in 1998 — and destruction in 2014 — of a roll of film depicting the victims of the Biak island massacre, Bomanak declared: “We are your closest neighbour, the Papuan race across Melanesia.

    “We did not desert you in your war against the Imperial Japanese Empire on our ancestral island, and many of your wounded lived because of our care and dedication.”

    In Aubrey’s statement accusing Canberra of “collusion” with Jakarta, he said that at the Indonesian government’s request, the Australian government had prevented West Papuan leaders William Zonggonao and Clemens Runaweri from providing testimony of Indonesian crimes against humanity to the United Nations in 1969.

    “If this is not treacherous enough, another Australian government remained silent about the 1998 Biak island massacre even though that federal government was in possession of the roll of film depicting the massacre’s crimes.

    “The federal government in office in 2014 is responsible for the destruction of this roll
    of film and photographs printed from the film,” claimed Aubrey.

    Aubrey’s 68-page open letter to Governor-General Hurley is a damning indictment of Indonesian atrocities during its colonial rule of West Papua.

  • How Washington teamed up with PNG to pip Canberra for ‘control’ of region

    COMMENTARY: A special correspondent in Port Moresby

    As an officer of the Department of Foreign Affairs in the Papua New Guinea government, I have to write anonymously to secure my safety.

    I am writing to reveal interference by the United States in PNG’s internal affairs which is undermining the bilateral relationship between Australia and PNG.

    As China’s influence rises in the Pacific Islands, PNG Prime Minister James Marape is worried that the China-Solomon Islands Security Agreement will lead to the Solomon Islands surpassing PNG’s dominant position in Melanesia.

    So the Marape government decided to negotiate separately with the US and Australia on two separate agreements they wished to conclude last May.

    The US rapidly resolved negotiations and the PNG-US Defence Cooperation Agreement was officially signed before Australia had even concluded its draft Bilateral Security Treaty.

    Marape has defended the US-PNG agreement several times in Parliament, while raising some constitutional concerns on an Australia-PNG treaty during his meeting with Australian Deputy Prime Minister Richard Marles.

    PNG has chosen the US to be the first defence partner, although Australia is PNG’s closest neighbour and long-time partner.

    Advance draft of treaty
    To its advantage, the US had acquired an advance draft of the Bilateral Security Treaty and knew Australia intended to be PNG’s first security partner.

    The US discovered that PNG would not cooperate with other countries in the Pacific Islands security area without Australia’s approval.

    So the US then made adjustments to the Defence Cooperation Agreement, revising or deleting articles that concerned PNG in order to settle the agreement ahead of its treaty with Australia.

    It was planned that the negotiation between Australia and PNG would be finished in April, but the US intervened and asked PNG to pause the talks with Australia and work on its own Defence Cooperation Agreement first.

    The US made commitments during the negotiation with PNG to step up its security support and assistance and cover shortfalls in assistance that Australia had not fulfilled.

    Marape and his cabinet had arrived at the belief that Australia was not fully committed to assisting PNG develop its defence force.

    There was apparently an internal report revealing that Australia’s intent was not to enhance and elevate some areas of security cooperation but to ensure PNG continued to rely on Australia for all its security needs.

    Australia’s process paused
    In its negotiation, considering that Australia was trying to prevent US dominance in the Pacific Islands region, the US asked PNG not to share the Defence Cooperation Agreement with Australia.

    As a result, Australia’s negotiation process with PNG was paused.

    The PNG government, frustrated by empty promises, considered the PNG Defence Force would never be developed in cooperation with Australia, so decided instead to work with a more powerful partner.

    PNG knows that its own geopolitical position is becoming of increasing importance, but believes Australia has never respected its position. So PNG decided to use this opportunity to reduce its dependence on Australia.

    It also seems the US has supported the Marape government in stifling opposition in PNG to assure the Defence Cooperation Agreement can be implemented smoothly.

    For example, Morobe Governor Luther Wenge was initially opposed to the agreement but joined Marape’s Pangu Party and supported it after Marape gave K50 million to his electorate development fund.

    Wenge later publicly criticised Australia, saying it did not want PNG to develop its own defence force.

    Long mutual history
    Australia is PNG’s long-term partner and closest neighbour and we have a long mutual history in economic, political and security cooperation.

    My colleagues and I believe that Marape should not betray Australia because it has been tempted by the US, which seems to have intervened to dilute or even ruin our bilateral relationship.

    Even though Marape explained to Australia that the Defence Cooperation Agreement would not affect the bilateral relationship, there is no doubt that the relationship with the US will have priority.

    So Marape has tightened his control over the mainstream media, social media posts have been deleted for no reason and voices opposing the Defence Cooperation Agreement cannot be heard.

    We hope some influential media and Australian friends will help us to protect PNG’s national interest and our bilateral relationship with Australia.

    This correspondent’s anonymous article was first published by Keith Jackson’s PNG Attitude website and is republished here with permission.

  • Saab receives order for Carl-Gustaf M4 from Australia

    Saab has received an order from the Australian Department of Defence for the supply of additional Carl-Gustaf® M4 weapons. The order value is AUD 56 million with deliveries during 2024-2025. The Carl-Gustaf M4 weapons will be delivered with Saab’s new Fire Control Device, FCD 558. “This order continues Saab’s longstanding relationship with the Australian Defence […]

    The post Saab receives order for Carl-Gustaf M4 from Australia appeared first on Asian Military Review.

    This post was originally published on Asian Military Review.

  • JFD launches its Fourth Generation Submarine Rescue System ‘Agile’

    The first system fully transportable in commercial aircraft. System design enables the fastest possible response within the 72 hours’ Time to First Rescue (TTFR) window. Built on 40 years’ proven submarine rescue expertise working with navies across the world. JFD is proud to unveil its ‘Agile’ Submarine Rescue System (SRS), based on 40 years’ experience, […]

    The post JFD launches its Fourth Generation Submarine Rescue System ‘Agile’ appeared first on Asian Military Review.

  • July 3 Marked The Hottest Day On Earth Since the 1850s

    It might feel like we’re in the dead of winter at the moment, which is probably because we are. Sunday, July 2, marked the exact middle of the year. Meanwhile, everywhere else….

    Yesterday, July 3, planet Earth recorded the hottest day ever since records began in the mid-1800s, with an average global temperature of 62.62 degrees Fahrenheit. In Celsius terms that’s a balmy 17 degrees.

    The recording is calculated by measuring air temperatures in multiple locations two meters above the Earth’s surface. The previous record for was set in July last year and August 2016, when the average global temperature reached 62.46 degrees.

    Experts put the record-breaking run of hot weather down to recent heat waves in the US, Canada and Europe, along with El Nino, where sea surface temperatures in the Pacific Ocean experience above average rises.

    The data records go back to 1979, but researchers claim they’re comparable with data that goes back much further, hence they’re confident this is the highest global temperature since instrumental measurements began around the 1850s.

    Closer to home, according to the Bureau of Meteorology (BOM), Australia’s “national area-average mean temperature” was 1.12 °C above the 1961-1990 average for June, which is the seventh-highest on record since 1910.

    “Mean maximum temperatures for June were warmer than average across Australia’s north and east and the warmest on record for much of Queensland. Mean maximum temperatures were below average for most of the western two thirds of Western Australia.

    “Mean minimum temperatures were above average for the Northern Territory and Queensland away from the south-east, for western and southern New South Wales, Victoria, Tasmania, much of South Australia and for most of the Western Australia’s Kimberley. Mean minimum temperatures were below average for large parts of the central and western Western Australia and for an area in the north-east of New South Wales.”

    Things were also decidedly above average for rainfall in Australia. Nationally, June 2023 recorded rainfall that was 24.6 per cent above the 1961-1990 average. In particular, the southern coast of Western Australia, and the north-west to the south-east of the continent (plus Tasmania) experienced high rainfalls.

    At the same time, according to BOM, “Rainfall was below average for most of central and eastern Queensland, coastal New South Wales extending inland and into far eastern Victoria, and for a large area in the west of Western Australia.”

    Australia is believed to be emerging from three consecutive years of El Nina, with a 70 per cent chance we’ll enter an El Nino phase this year, which commonly brings drought to large sections of the Australian continent.

    (MAIN IMAGE ABOVE: A dust storm in the distance from Lake Menindee, in the Far West of NSW, pictured in April 2020. The image was captured by New Matilda editor Chris Graham, with a drone. He happened to be filming the lake for a documentary about the drought, when the dust storm blew in. Dust storms are common in Outback Australia during drought, and can often travel thousands of kilometres before dissipating. They’re contributing to Australia’s alarming rising salinity levels, on the back of Australia’s already terrible environmental record).

    The post July 3 Marked The Hottest Day On Earth Since the 1850s appeared first on New Matilda.

    This post was originally published on New Matilda.

  • Aussie cops paid $1300 to identify as “gender neutral” – Teen girls in UK say NO to “trans” lies – And yes, they ARE coming for your children

    According to this article (sent to me by Allyn in New Zealand), “the number of Victoria Police employees self-identifying as ‘gender neutral’ has more than quadrupled since last year as the force confirms it is investigating reports some of its officers are gaming the HR system in order to gain an extra $1300 a year.”

    ACANB? (all cops are non-binary)

    “In its annual report last year, Victoria Police only had 32 employees who were so-called ‘self-described’ as neither male nor female. But workforce figures as of June 27 provided to news.com.au show that number had soared to 139 — 127 of whom are sworn officers.”

    “Self-described.”

    😑

    Let’s end the “gender ideology” psyop now — before they try pushing “gender-neutral” shopping discounts, tax breaks, advantages when applying for a job or school, and more.

    Related: Two 14-year-old girls have written an open letter to the UK Education Secretary Gillian Keegan ahead of the forthcoming Department for Education report on transgender schools guidance.

    Read their letter right here.

    The kids are asking for help. It’s our job to deliver for them.

    If anyone tells you there’s nothing dangerous about chants like “We’re here, we’re queer, we’re coming for your children,” show them this right here. Click the link if you think anyone is overreacting.

    *****

    Again, the kids desperately need and are begging for help.

    It’s our job to protect them.

    Speak it into existence and speak up — loud and often.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • Sir Kostas ‘touched the lives’ of many Pacific people, says Samoan PM

    By Gorethy Kenneth in Port Moresby

    Samoan Prime Minister Fiame Naomi Mata’afa’s tribute to Papua New Guinea’s  businessman Sir Kostas Constantinou was very touching as she recapped how his businesses touched the lives of the people of Samoa.

    Her message, read out by Samoa’s High Commissioner to Australia, Hinari Petana during Sir Kostas’ wake in Brisbane where he died from heart complications last month, was a reminder to his children to continue the legacy he had left in Samoa.

    High Commissioner Petana and her entourage, including Sir Kostas’ Samoan family, were all present throughout his funeral service, the burial and the wake.

    PNG businessman Sir Kostas Constantinou
    PNG businessman Sir Kostas Constantinou . . . a development visionary in the Asia-Pacific region. Image: IB

    There was also a fitting ceremony where George Jr, son of the late Sir Kostas, was handed Samoa’s chiefly red ‘ulafala (pandanus key necklace) most often worn by Samoan tulafale (orator chiefs).

    His father was adorned with a chiefly title Tulaniu in Samoa — George Jr will take over the reign as the next in line. He was also presented a Samoan ie toga, a fine mat.

    “He touched the lives of so many spirits in the Pacific region, in particular in our country, Samoa, and its people through rewarding and inspirational investments,” Prime Minister Fiame Naomi Mata’afa said in her message.

    “The contribution of Sir Kostas to our country has been hugely significant, especially in our economic growth.

    ‘Passion and influence’
    “His passion and influence in our communities will be remembered by everyone that enters the doors of Taumeasina Island Resort, the Bank of South Pacific, as much as he shaped everything, our cultural values, during one of his few visits to Samoa, including his acceptance of his chiefly title.

    “To George Jr and the children, may you continue your father’s legacy in Samoa and join us as a family in the coming years.”

    Sir Kostas, 66, was regarded as a visionary businessman who employed thousands of people and developed businesses across the Asia-Pacific region.

    He was the founder of Constantinou Group of Companies.

    His leadership and commitment to excellence and innovation was a key factor in driving the Constantinou Group, including Airways Hotels and Apartments, Hebou Construction, Lamana Hotel and Lamana Development Ltd, Monier Ltd and Rouna Quarries Ltd in PNG to success.

    Sir Kostas served as chair of the Bank South Pacific Financial Group Ltd and Air Niugini for many years.

    He was also a director of Oil Search Ltd.

    He was the father of Constantia, George, Andrea and Theophilus and grandfather to Imogen, Syliva, Harry, Zoe and George.

     

    This post was originally published on Asia Pacific Report.

  • Australia defense budget to register CAGR of 5.2% through 2028, forecasts GlobalData

    Amidst escalating tensions in the Indo-Pacific region, evolving geopolitical challenges, and growing strategic competition, Australia recognizes the necessity of addressing these factors by building a modern military force. As a result, Australia’s defense budget is projected to register a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 5.2%, growing from $39.5 billion in 2024 to $48.3 billion […]

    The post Australia defense budget to register CAGR of 5.2% through 2028, forecasts GlobalData appeared first on Asian Military Review.

    This post was originally published on Asian Military Review.

  • Japan’s Fukushima nuclear waste plan stirs ‘Pacific Chernobyl’ risk protests

    By Peter Boyle in Sydney

    As Pacific communities protest the Japanese government’s plan to dump more than a million tonnes of radioactive waste water from the Fukushima nuclear plant into the Pacific Ocean, Australian anti-nuclear activists are highlighting the complicity of Australian uranium exporting companies.

    While the Fukushima Daiichi power station operator, Tokyo Electric Power Company (TEPCO), claims that the water will be treated to reduce radioactive content, anti-nuclear activists have no faith in TEPCO’s assurances.

    The Candlelight Alliance, a Korean community group in Sydney, is organising a protest outside the Japanese consulate this Saturday.

    Spokersperson Sihyun Paik told Green Left: “We have a great fear that it may already be too late to stop Japan’s release of radioactively contaminated waste water into our largest ocean, an action by which every Pacific Rim nation will be impacted.

    “There are serious, global ramifications,” he said. “It will directly endanger the marine life with which it comes into contact, as well as devastate the livelihoods of those reliant on such marine life, such as fisherfolk.

    “All living organisms will be implicitly affected, whether it is the unwitting consumer of contaminated produce, or even beachgoers.

    “The danger posed by the plan cannot be contained within just the Northeast Asia region. In two to three years, it will eventually reach and contaminate all ocean waters to certain, yet significant degrees according to scientists.

    Korean fishery victims
    “The local Korean fishery industry is the first commercial victim of the Fukushima nuclear disaster and it raised deep concerns to the Korean government immediately after the explosion of the nuclear reactors.

    “This was in conjunction with Korea’s progressive action groups during the term of the previous Moon Jae-In administration.

    “However, since the current administration (2022), the voice of protest has been extinguished at the government level, invariably raising suspicion of possible under the table dealings between Japan’s Kishida government and current Korean President Yoon [Suk Yeol] during the latter’s recent visit to Japan.”

    Epeli Lesuma, from the Fiji-based Pacific Network on Globalisation, told Green Left that “for Pacific people the Ocean represents more than just a vast blue expanse that Japan can just use as a dumpsite.

    “Our Ocean represents the economic, spiritual and cultural heart of Pacific countries.

    “Pacific people know all too well the cost of nuclear testing and dumping. The Pacific was used as a nuclear test site by the UK, France and the USA who carried out a total of 315 tests on Christmas Island in Kiribati, Australia, Māohi Nui or French Polynesia and the Marshall Islands.

    “These nuclear legacies have cost us countless lives and continue to impact the health and well-being of our people; it has impacted access to our fishing grounds and land to plant crops to support our families; and it has cost us our homes, with Pacific people displaced (on Bikini and Enewetak) due to nuclear contamination.

    Japan, Pacific share trauma
    “Japan and the Pacific share the trauma of nuclear weapons and testing.

    “So it comes as a deep disappointment to us that the Japanese government would consider actions that threaten not only Pacific people and our Ocean but the health and well-being of all the planet’s oceans and the people who depend upon them.

    “The Pacific Ocean also contains the largest tuna fish stocks which are a source of economic revenue for our countries. The Japanese government’s plans to dump its nuclear wastewater into our Ocean pose a direct threat to the economic prosperity of our countries and in turn our developmental aspirations as well as being a fundamental breach of Pacific people’s rights to a clean and healthy sustainable environment.”

    Australian anti-nuclear activist Nat Lowrey delivered a statement of solidarity from the Australian Nuclear Free Alliance when she visited affected local communities in Fukushima in March.

    The statement acknowledged that uranium from the Ranger and Olympic Dam mines was in TEPCO’s Fukushima reactors when the meltdowns, explosions and fires took place in March 2011.

    The ANFA statement said that “Australian governments, and mining companies BHP and Rio Tinto, are partly responsible for the death and destruction resulting from the Fukushima disaster. They knew about the corruption in Japan’s nuclear industry but kept supplying uranium.”

    Lowrey said that since it was Australian uranium that fuelled the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant, “the Australian government has a responsibility to stand with local communities in Fukushima as well as communities in Japan, Korea, China and Pacific Island states in calling on the Japanese government not to dump radioactive wastewater into the Pacific Ocean”.

    ‘Fundamental self-determination right’
    “We must support Pacific peoples’ fundamental right to their sovereignty and self-determination against Japan’s nuclear colonialism.

    “If Japan is to go ahead with the dumping of radioactive waste, Australia should play a lead role in taking a case to the International Tribunal for the Law of the Sea against Japan.”

    Paik said no Australian government had taken serious action since the Fukushima disaster.

    “Despite the Japanese government’s decision to release nuclear contaminated water into the ocean, no official statement or comment has been made by the [Anthony] Albanese government.

    “We did not expect any form of government level protest on this issue due to conflicts of interest with Australia’s member status in the Quad partnership which is a key pillar in Australia’s foreign policy, and an influential determinant of our stance on nuclear energy.”

    When the G7 met in Tokyo, the Japanese government urged the summit to approve the planned radioactive water release.

    Tanaka Shigeru, from the Pacific Asia Resource Centre in Japan, said: “Japan did not get the approval by the G7 as it had hoped, but it stopped at saying the G7 will adhere to the conclusion of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA).

    ‘IAEA approves release’
    “The IAEA is of course approving of the release, so it is a way for them to say they have approved without explicitly saying so.”

    Shigeru said that despite a three-year propaganda campaign over Fukushima, most people polled in Japan in April said that “the government has not done enough to garner the understanding of the public”.

    Only 6.5 percent of those polled believe that the Japanese government has done enough.

    Yet it has “done enough to keep people from the streets”, Shigeru said.

    “While there are, of course, people who are still continuing the struggle, I must say the movement has peaked already after what has been a fervent three-year struggle.”

    Japanese opponents of the radioactive water release, including fisherfolk, have been fighting through every administrative and legal step but now “there are no more domestic hurdles that the Japanese government needs to clear in order to begin the dumping”, Shigeru said.

    “The opposition parties have been so minimised in Japan that there is very little realistic means to challenge the situation except for maybe international pressure. That is really the only thing standing in the way of the dumping.

    Ambassador propaganda
    “So Japan has been taking ambassadors from the Pacific nations on lucrative paid-for trips to Fukushima to spread the propaganda that the dumping will be safe.”

    Lesuma confirmed the impact on swaying some Pacific Island governments, such as Papua New Guinea and the Federated States of Micronesia.

    “Pacific Islands Forum member states have been some of the most vocal opponents at the international level of the Japanese government’s plans to dump their nuclear wastewater into the Pacific Ocean,” he said.

    “The PIF leaders had appointed an Independent Panel of Experts who have engaged with TEPCO scientists and the IAEA to provide advice to Pacific governments on the wastewater disposal plans … the Panel has concluded unanimously that Japan should not release nuclear wastewater into the Pacific Ocean and should explore other alternatives.

    “The Fiji government has been one such Pacific government consistent in coming out strongly in opposing Japan’s plans.

    “The PNG Fisheries Minister, Jelta Wong, has also been vocal and consistent in expressing his disapproval of the same, going as far as saying that the nuclear wastewater discharge would create a ‘Pacific Chernobyl’ with the potential to cause harm to Pacific people for generations to come.”

    Peter Boyle is a Green Left activist and contributing writer. Republished with permission.

  • Australia offers to extend deployment of troops, police in Solomon Islands

    Australia has offered to extend its military and police deployment in the Solomon Islands as the Pacific island country, which has cultivated security and economic ties with China, prepares to host a regional sporting event later this year and hold postponed elections in the first half of 2024.

    Australia’s Minister of Defence Richard Marles, who met with Solomon Islands Prime Minister Manasseh Sogavare during a two-day visit to the Pacific country, said on Thursday that Australia was willing to provide security assistance for as long as necessary. 

    Australia sent more than 200 troops and police to the Solomon Islands in late 2021 at the request of Sogavare following anti-China and anti-government riots in the capital Honiara. Fiji, Papua New Guinea and New Zealand also contributed to the security mission.

    “We spoke about the Solomons International Assistance Force, which Australia is a contributing member [of], and we made it clear that if it was the Solomons’ wish for the Solomons International Assistance Force to continue then Australia stood ready for that to occur,” Marles, who is also Australia’s deputy prime minister, told reporters in Honiara.  

    “We are happy to support a continuation of the presence of SIAF in supporting the Royal Solomon Islands Police Force,” he said. 

    The Solomon Islands, home to some 700,000 people, has become a focal point for the U.S.-China rivalry in the Pacific. Sogavare’s government switched its diplomatic recognition to China from Taiwan in 2019 and signed a security pact with Beijing last year that alarmed the United States and allies such as Australia. 

    A statement from Sogavare’s office said assessments of security needs for the Pacific Games, which will be held in Honiara in November, are still being carried out. “Should there be areas to address, Australia will be notified through appropriate channels,” it said.

    The statement also said the security treaty between Australia and the Solomon Islands should be reviewed to take into account the changing security challenges faced by both countries. It called for “more support to strengthen our capacity and capability to respond to internal security challenges.”

    marles dock.jpg
    Australia’s Minister of Defence and deputy prime minister Richard Marles [second from right] talks to Australian Defence Advisor Col. Justin Bywater [right] while Solomon Islands Commissioner of Police Mostyn Mangau [second from left] looks on in Honiara on June 29, 2023. [Gina Maka’a/BenarNews]

    Both China and Australia have been providing training and equipment to the Solomon Islands police, including weapons, sparking concern their rivalry could cause new instability in a South Pacific country that spiraled into chaos only two decades ago.

    Several years of instability around the turn of the century, fueled by stolen police equipment, still looms large for Solomon Islanders, who call the period The Tensions. Corruption, ethnic strife and political divides made the country seem ungovernable and culminated in an Australian-led military intervention from 2003 until 2017.

    Last November, China handed over two water cannon trucks, 30 motorbikes and 20 white utility vehicles emblazoned with the red China Aid logo to Solomon Islands police while Australia donated 60 MK18 rifles and 13 vehicles, some of which will be used in a new mobile protection unit for VIPs.  

    Solomon Islands police said in May that some 30 officers were undergoing advanced capability training in China on top of 33 officers who received training at the Fujian Police College last year. It said further contingents would receive leadership and capability training in China this year and that the China Police Liaison Team in Honiara would continue its training programs in the Solomon Islands.

    Marles said a peaceful security environment for the Pacific Games – which China, Australia, Indonesia and other countries are helping to bankroll – and elections next year are key objectives of the Solomon Islands government. 

    Sogavare’s government postponed the elections, which were due this year, citing the cost of hosting the Pacific Games.

    “We are very mindful that an ongoing SIAF [presence] could be an assistance to Solomon Islands and we certainly made it clear that we would be ready to provide that if Solomon Islands want it,” Marles said.

    Marles’ visit to the Solomon Islands also resulted in pledges of assistance including a previously announced grant of 25 million Australian dollars ($16.5 million) to pay for the Solomons’ 2024 general election, provision of small fast vessels for the Solomon Islands police and help to upgrade a shipyard.

    Before leaving the Solomon Islands on Thursday afternoon, Marles officially opened a new critical care unit at the country’s main hospital that was funded by Australia.

    BenarNews is an RFA-affiliated news organization.

    This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by By Gina Maka’a for BenarNews.

  • Australian NASAMS air defence system achieves key milestone

    Raytheon Australia has successfully performed the first launch of the Australian Army’s new short range ground-based air defence system (SRGBAD) at the 122,000 km2 Woomera Test Range (WTR) in South Australia, the company announced on 19 June. Raytheon Australia is leading a team to deliver a localised version of the National Advanced Surface-to-Air Missile System […]

    The post Australian NASAMS air defence system achieves key milestone appeared first on Asian Military Review.

    This post was originally published on Asian Military Review.

  • Nauru’s Refugee Stain: Australia’s Continued Offshore Processing Regime

    The last refugee, for now, has left the small, guano-producing state of Nauru.  For a decade, the Pacific Island state served as one of Australia’s offshore prisons for refugees and asylum seekers, a cruel deterrent to those daring to exercise their right to seek asylum via the sea.

    Since July 2013, 3,127 people making the naval journey to Australia to seek sanctuary found themselves in carceral facilities in Nauru and Papua New Guinea’s Manus Island, told that they would never resettle on the Australian mainland.  Such persons were duly euphemised as “transitory persons” to be hurried on to third country destinations, if not returned to their country of origin, a form of vacant reasoning typical of a callous bureaucracy.

    The wisdom here was that other countries would not only be more suitable for such persons, but keener candidates to pull their weight in terms of processing and accepting refugees.  For the Australian Commonwealth, outsourcing responsibilities from protecting citizens to shielding vulnerable arrivals from harm, has become a matter of dark habit.

    Many of those remaining refugees held on the Australian mainland are the subjects of acute care, and all await transfer to third countries such as Canada under its private sponsorship program, the United States, New Zealand or other destinations.

    In the meantime, 80 remain in PNG.  The situation there is marred by a fundamental legal peculiarity.  In October 2017, the Supreme Court of Papua New Guinea found the Manus Island Centre to be both illegal and unconstitutional.  (PNG, unlike Australia, has a constitution prohibiting violations of personal liberty, even for non-PNG nationals.)  Its closure led to the removal of the detainees to various transition centres devoid of basic amenities, including water, electricity and medical support.

    Both PNG and Australia proceeded to squabble over responsibility, despite the obvious fact that the latter exercises effective control over the facilities and those being held in them.  Emilie McDonnell of Human Rights Watch deems it indisputable “that Australia bears primary responsibility for those in offshore detention under its policies and has an ongoing legal duty to find a durable solution.”

    The offshore concentration camp system established and prosecuted by respective federal governments has become the envy for autocrats, populists and reactionaries the world over.  Fact-finding missions have been made by European Union member states.  The model is mesmerising officials in the UK.  Its credentials of cruelty and suffering are beyond doubt: 14 deaths since 2012, marked by gross medical neglect, suicide and murder by overly enthusiastic guards.  Spokesperson for the Refugee Action Collective, Ian Rintoul, suggested that the legacy on Nauru “will forever stain the record of both sides of Australian politics”.

    The absence of any refugee inmates in Nauru’s detention facility does not herald its closure.  Far from it: the Albanese government has, according to Federal Budget figures, promised to spend A$486 million this year on the facility.

    The Department of Home Affairs continues to tersely state that the position of the government “on maritime smuggling and irregular maritime ventures has not changed.  Any person entering Australia by boat without a valid visa will be returned or taken to a regional processing country for protection claims assessment.  Unauthorised maritime arrivals will not settle in Australia.”

    For anyone concerned about the welfare of such persons held in captivity, the department makes a feeble assurance: “All transitory persons in Nauru reside in community accommodation and have access to health and welfare services.  Transitory persons have work rights and can operate businesses.”  These people have evidently not been to the prison idyll they so praise.  But not to worry, a wounded conscience could also be put to rest by the fact that there were “currently no minors under regional processing arrangements” on the island.

    In Senate estimates, it was also revealed that the government would continue forking out A$350 million annually to maintain the Nauru facility as a “contingency” for any future arrivals.  According to a spokesperson for the Department of Home Affairs, the processing centre was “ready to receive and process any new unauthorised maritime arrivals, future-proofing Australia’s response to maritime people-smuggling”.  And so, old canards are recycled in their staleness and counterfeit quality.

    Another unsavoury aspect to this needless cost to the Australian budget is the recipient of such taxpayer largesse.  The Albanese government has an ongoing contract with the US prison company, Management and Training Corporation (MTC), which is responsible for running the facilities till September 2025 at the cost of A$422 million.

    MTC has a spotty resume, though it trumpets its record as a “leader in social impact”.  Impact is certainly not an issue, if maladministration, wrongful death, poor medical care and a failing performance in rehabilitation count in the equation.  In 2015, then Arizona governor Dough Ducey cancelled MTC’s contract after a withering state department of corrections report into a riot at Kingman prison identifying “a culture of disorganisation, disengagement and disregard for state policies”.  As a 2021 lawsuit filed in the District Court of the Southern District of California pungently alleged, MTC “is a private corporation that traffics in human captivity for profit.”

    The very fact that MTC Australia advertises itself as a provider of “evidence-based rehabilitation programs and other services to approximately 1,000 male inmates in Australia” begs that old question as to why they need to oversee refugees and asylum seekers in the first place.  But the answer is glaringly evident: anyone daring to make the perilous journey across the seas to the world’s largest island continent are seen as presumptively criminal, trafficked by actual criminals.  Such a sickness of attitude and policy continues to keep the Australian political imagination captive and defiant before law and decency.

  • Australia Keeps Escalating Its Censorship And Propaganda Campaign

    Listen to a reading of this article (reading by Tim Foley):

    ❖

    There’s a frenzied rush by the Australian political/media class to both propagandise Australians as quickly as possible into supporting preparations for war with China, and to ram through legislation that facilitates the censorship of online speech.

    Australia’s Communications Minister Michelle Rowland is set to release draft legislation imposing hefty fines on social media companies who fail to adequately block “misinformation” and “disinformation” from circulation in Australia, a frightening prospect which will likely have far-reaching consequences for political speech in the nation.

    Sydney Morning Herald reports:

    class=”mk ml mm”>

    Under the proposed laws, the authority would be able to impose a new “code” on specific companies that repeatedly fail to combat misinformation and disinformation or an industry-wide “standard” to force digital platforms to remove harmful content.

    The maximum penalty for systemic breaches of a registered code would be $2.75 million or 2 per cent of global turnover — whichever is higher.

    The maximum penalty for breaching an industry standard would be $6.88 million, or 5 per cent of a company’s global turnover. In the case of Facebook’s owner, Meta, for example, the maximum penalty could amount to a fine of more than $8 billion.

    Those are the kinds of numbers that change a company’s censorship protocols. We’re already seeing social media censorship of content in Australia that the Australian government has ruled unacceptable; here’s what the transphobic tweets embedded in a right-wing article about Twitter censorship looks like when you try to view them on Twitter from Australia, for example:

    These tweets were reportedly hidden from Australians on the platform at the behest of the Australian government. Australians could wind up seeing much more of this sort of Australia-specific censorship from social media platforms if this “misinformation” legislation goes through. Or they could just start censoring it for everyone.

    The problem with laws against inaccurate information is of course that somebody needs to be making the determination what information is true and what is false, and those determinations will necessarily be informed by the biases and agendas of the person making them. I can substantiate my claim that Russia’s invasion of Ukraine was provoked by NATO powers using an abundance of facts and evidence, for example, but there’s still a sizeable portion of the population which would consider such claims malignant disinformation with or without the supporting data.

    When the government involves itself in the regulation of speech, it is necessarily incentivized to regulate speech in a way that benefits itself and its allies. Nobody who supports government regulation of online mis- and disinformation can articulate how such measures can be safeguarded in a surefire way against the abuses and agendas of the powerful.

    Under a Totalitarian Regime, your government censors your speech if you say unauthorized things. Under a Free Democracy, your government orders corporations to censor your speech if you say unauthorized things.

    At the same time, Australian media have been hammering one remarkably uniform message into public consciousness with increasing aggression lately: there is a war with China coming, Australia will be involved, and Australia must do much more to prepare for this war as quickly as possible.

    Australians are remarkably vulnerable to propaganda due to the fact that ownership of our nation’s media is the most concentrated in the western world, with a powerful duopoly of Nine Entertainment and Murdoch’s News Corp controlling most of the Australian press.

    Both of these media conglomerates have been involved in the latest excuse to talk about how more military spending and militarisation is needed, this time taking the form of a war machine-funded think tanker publishing a book about how we all need to prepare for war with China.

    Nine Entertainment’s Sydney Morning Herald and The Age have an article out titled “Military expert warns of ‘very serious risk’ of China war within five years” by the odious Matthew Knott, who is best known for being told to drum himself out of Australian journalism by former prime minister Paul Keating for his appalling war-with-China propaganda series published earlier this year by the same papers. Readers who follow Australian media would do well to remember Knott’s name, because he has become one of the most prolific war propagandists in the western press.

    The “military expert” who warns of the need to prepare for an imminent war with China is a man named Ross Babbage, who as Knott notes is “a non-resident senior fellow at the Centre for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments in Washington.” What Knott fails to disclose to his readers is that the Centre for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments is funded by every war profiteer and war machine entity under the sun, the majority coming straight from the US Department of Defense itself.

    As we’ve discussed many times previously, it is never, ever okay for the press to cite war machine-funded think tankers for expertise or analysis on matters of war and foreign policy, and it is doubly egregious for them to do so without at least disclosing their massive conflict of interest to their readers. This act of extreme journalistic malpractice has become the norm throughout the mainstream press, because it helps mass media reporters do their actual job: administering propaganda to an unsuspecting public.

    The Murdoch press has also been using Babbage’s book release as an excuse to bang the drums of war, with multiple Sky News segments and articles with titles like “Military analyst Ross Babbage warns Australia of potential war with China in coming years,” “National security expert Ross Babbage warns ‘strong possibility’ of war with China in latest book,” and “‘Running out of time’: Xi may move on Taiwan in next few years.” Again, not one mention of Babbage’s conflict of interests.

    All for a news story that (and I cannot stress this enough) is not a news story. A war machine-funded think tanker saying he wants more war is not a news story — it’s just a thing that happens when the war machine is allowed to pay people to be warmongers.

    “War Machine-Funded Warmonger Wants More War.” That’s your headline. That’s the one and only headline this non-story could ever deserve, if any.

    Propaganda and censorship are the two most important tools of imperial narrative control, and it’s very telling that Australia is ramping them both up as the nation is being transformed into a weapon for the US empire to use against China. Steps are being taken to ensure that the Australian populace will be on board with whatever agendas the empire has planned for us in the coming years, and judging from what we’re seeing right now, it isn’t going to be pretty.

    _____________

    All my work is free to bootleg and use in any way, shape or form; republish it, translate it, use it on merchandise; whatever you want. My work is entirely reader-supported, so if you enjoyed this piece please consider sharing it around, throwing some money into my tip jar on Patreon, Paypal, or Substack, buying an issue of my monthly zine, and following me on Facebook, Twitter, Soundcloud or YouTube. If you want to read more you can buy my books. The best way to make sure you see the stuff I publish is to subscribe to the mailing list on Substack, which will get you an email notification for everything I publish. For more info on who I am, where I stand, and what I’m trying to do with this platform, click here. All works co-authored with my husband Tim Foley.

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  • Nuclear experts offer to ‘take a sip’ of Japan’s treated reactor wastewater

    By Lydia Lewis, RNZ Pacific journalist

    Independent nuclear experts have offered to drink water and eat fish from the Pacific Ocean after Japan dumps its nuclear waste water into the Pacific.

    Japan is planning to ditch over one million tonnes of ALPS-treated radioactive wastewater from the damaged Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant into the Pacific Ocean over 30 to 40 years starting from sometime this year.

    ALPS is an Advanced Liquid Processing System.

    New Zealand and Australian experts told media at an online panel discussion hosted by NZ’s Science Media Centre that Japan had good intentions.

    The experts said they believed that as long as the wastewater was tested before it was released the operation would be safe.

    Two even went as far as saying they would “take a sip” of the treated wastewater.

    “I would drink the water. I mean, it’s like going down to the beach and swallowing a mouthful of water when you’re swimming,” said University of Auckland physics senior lecturer Dr David Krofcheck.

    “It’s saltwater. I prefer the desalinated before I drink it,” he added. Dr Krofcheck specialises in nuclear physics and natural radiation from the environment.

    “Would I eat the fish? Yes, I would,” Adelaide University’s School of Physics, Chemistry and Earth Sciences associate professor Tony Hooker added.

    ‘The least bad option’
    The contaminated water has been used to cool the melted reactor of the damaged Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant.

    More than 1000 tanks are now full and Tokyo Electric Power Company (TEPCO) is running out of storage space.

    Japan has said it will treat the water to ensure it is harmless. It will also dilute the water and then release it into the Pacific Ocean.

    Dr Krofcheck said that option was the “best one”.

    “That’s probably the least bad option. Not that that’s a bad option. Because the dose, or the amount of tritium being diluted is so small. But I think the least bad option is releasing,” he said.

    Ocean circulation modeller and researcher in Taiwan, Professor Chau-Ron Wu, told media he predicted the water from Fukushima would take 2-3 years to reach North America, one year to get to Taiwan and sweep across much of the Pacific.

    No release date has been set, but associate professor Tony Hooker said that what was known is, “The water is going to be released in [northern hemisphere] summer 2023.”

    “I think the release is imminent. And I guess that will be a decision for the Japanese government. Ultimately, they can make that decision. They don’t need to rely on the International Atomic Energy Agency or any other agency.”

    Associate professor Hooker said that as long as it was only tritium and carbon 14 that’s released, and in small quantities, he is confident it would be safe.

    Dr Krofcheck agrees: “I’m very comfortable with releasing it, as long as we can guarantee the Royal Science Society can guarantee that the nasty strontium, caesium, iodine, cobalt 60 can be removed”.

    They will be removed by an ALPS.

    “So, most of the ALPS processes are using a zeolite clay and which is very absorbent. Once the water has gone through that the radionuclides are bound to a solid, you can dry that out and store it as radioactive waste,” Hooker explained.

    no caption
    Nuclear power station staff . . . they have the means and resources but there is still a lot of uncertainty across the Pacific about the water release project. Image: RNZ Pacific/AFP/IAEA

    ‘I really thought they reconsider it’
    There is still a lot of uncertainty across the Pacific about the release project.

    Japan is in talks with the Pacific Islands Forum (PIF) and has been providing data to their independent expert panel to analyse, which Hooker is a part of.

    He acknowledged those who want to end nuclear waste dumping, which he says already happens around the world.

    “Whilst there’s no issues from a radiation safety perspective about putting this radiation into the sea, should there be some level of discussion or intensive research about how we can minimise disposing into the sea in the future?”

    ‘Retraumatising’ for Tahitian
    A Mā’ohi anti-nuclear activist in Tahiti, Hinamoeura Cross, found the news of Japan pushing forward with its plans despite backlash retraumatising.

    “I’m really shocked by what the Japanese are going to do. We know that they have planned that for many years, but I really thought that they will reconsider that,” Cross said.

    For her, all nuclear issues are personal. Japan’s plans are of interest in particular as they impact on her ocean, the Pacific.

    “I remember my great grandmother and my grandmother that were sick. Then my mum and my auntie, they had the thyroid cancer,” Cross said.

    When Cross was aged about 10, her sister got sick and at 23-years-old she was diagnosed with leukaemia.

    All of the women she loves and looked up to were “poisoned” by French nuclear testing in the Pacific, she said.

    Now that she is a mother of two, her voice has become staunchly against nuclear colonialism. She wants better healthcare for survivors of French nuclear testing.

    “I’m anxious about the health care of my children; are they going to be sick or not? We really need this healthcare in Tahiti because of the 193 nuclear bomb (tests that France detonated in the Pacific),” Cross said.

    Pacific reacts to Japan’s plans
    Pacific leaders have been voicing their views on the upcoming release, which Japan says it needs to do in an effort to make progress on decommissioning the power plant.

    Papua New Guinea Prime Minister James Marape is the latest leader to issue his support after being assured of the project’s safety by Japan.

    Safety is a sentiment echoed by TEPCO, the owners of the plant.

    “The release into the sea from the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear (plant) would be the most realistic approach,” TEPCO Chief Officer for ALPS treated water management Junichi Matsumoto told RNZ Pacific in January 2023.

    Damage at Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Station in 2011.
    Damage at Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Station in 2011 . . . a release into the sea . . . the most realistic” option. Image: TEPCO/RNZ News

    The dumping operation is expected to take between 30 and 40 years as it needs to be treated by the ALPS system and then diluted by sea water to meet regulatory standards.

    The International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) is reviewing the processes.

    The IAEA’s latest report has found TEPCO has managed to demonstrate it can measure the radionuclides in the treated water stored on site accurately and precisely.

    This article is republished under a community partnership agreement with RNZ.

    Hinamoeura Cross with a member of the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons (ICAN) in Vienna
    A member of the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons (ICAN) with Hinamoeura Cross in Vienna, Austria. Image: Hinamoeura Cross/RNZ News

    This post was originally published on Asia Pacific Report.

  • Australian navy selects SATCOM modernisation provider

    EM Solutions, a subsidiary of Australian company Electro Optic Systems, has been awarded a contract to modernise the Royal Australian Navy’s (RAN’s) satellite communications (SATCOM) systems under the Department of Defence (DoD)’s Project Sea 1442 Phase 5 programme, the company announced on 16 June. Under the A$150 million (US$101 million) contract awarded by the DoD’s […]

    The post Australian navy selects SATCOM modernisation provider appeared first on Asian Military Review.

    This post was originally published on Asian Military Review.

  • ‘Other people’s wars’, climate crisis – South Pacific not in good shape, warns Fiji leader

    By Kalinga Seneviratne in Suva

    In a keynote speech at the annual Pacific Update conference the region’s major university, Fiji deputy Prime Minister Professor Biman Prasad has warned delegates from the Pacific, Australia and New Zealand that Oceania is not in good shape because of problems not of their own making.

    Professor Prasad was speaking at the three-day conference at the University of the South Pacific where he was the former dean of the Business and Economic Faculty,

    He listed these problems as climate change, geopolitics, superpower conflict, a declining resource base in fisheries and forests, environmental degradation and debilitating health problems leading to significant social and economic challenges.

    He asked the delegates to consider whether the situation of the South Pacific nations is improving when they take stock of where the region is today.

    “What is clear, or should be clear to all of us, is that as a region, we are not in entirely good shape,” said Professor Prasad.

    Pacific Update, held annually at USP, is the premier forum for discussing economic, social, political, and environmental issues in the region.

    Held on June 13-15 this year, it was co-hosted by the Development Policy Centre of the Australian National University (ANU) and USP’s School of Accounting, Finance and Economics.

    Distant wars
    In his keynote, Professor Prasad pinpointed an issue adversely affecting the region’s economic wellbeing.

    “Our region has suffered disproportionally from distant wars in Ukraine,” he said. “Price rises arising from Russia’s war on Ukraine is ravaging communities in our islands by way of price hikes that are making the basics unaffordable.

    “Even though not a single grain of wheat is imported from this region, the price increase for a loaf of bread across the Pacific is probably among the highest in the world.

    “This is not unbelievable, not to mention unjust,” he noted, adding that this is due to supply chain failures in these remote corners of the world where the cost of shipping goods and services have spiralled.

    Though he did not specifically mention the collateral damage from economic sanctions imposed by the West, he did point out that shipping costs have increased several hundred percent since the conflict started.

    “In the backdrop of all these, or should I say forefront, is a runaway climate crisis whose most profound and acutest impacts are felt by small island states,” said Professor Prasad. “The impacts of climate change on our economies and societies are systematic; they are widespread, and they are growing”.

    Rather than focusing on the problems listed by Professor Prasad, this year’s Pacific Update devoted a significant part of the event to the Pacific Australia Labour Mobility (PALM) scheme, where Australia has opened its borders to thousands of workers from the Pacific island countries with new provisions provided for them to acquire permanent residency in the country.

    Development aid scheme
    Australia is presenting this as a development assistance scheme where many academics presenting research papers showed that the remittances they send back help local economies by increasing consumption(and economic growth).

    Hiroshi Maeda, a researcher from ANU, said that remittances play a crucial role in the economy of the Kingdom of Tonga in the Pacific, a country of just over 106,000 people.

    According to recent census data from Australia, New Zealand and the United States of America quoted in a UN report, 126.540 Tongans live overseas. According to a survey by Maeda, temporary migration has helped to increase household savings by 38.1 percent from remittances sent home.

    It also increases the expenditure on services such as health, education and recreation while also helping the housing sector.

    There was a whole session devoted to the PALM scheme where Australian researchers presented survey findings done among Pacific unskilled workers, mainly working in the farm sector in Australia, about their satisfaction rates with the Australian work experience.

    Dung Doan and Ryan Edwards presented data from a joint World Bank-ANU survey. They said there had been allegations of exploited Pacific workers and concerns about worker welfare and social impacts, but this is the first study addressing these issues.

    They have interviewed thousands of workers, and the researchers say “a majority of the workers are very satisfied” and “social outcomes on balance are net positive”.

    Better planning needed
    When IDN asked a panellist about PALM and other migrant labour recruitment schemes of Australia such as hiring of nurses from the Pacific and the impact it is creating — especially in Fiji where there are labour shortages as a result — his response was that it needs better planning by governments to train its workers.

    But, one Pacific academic from USP (who did not want to be named) told IDN later, “Yes, we can spend to train them, and Australia will come and steal them after six months”. She lamented that there needed to be more Pacific academics who made their voices heard.

    One such voice, however, was Denton Rarawa, Senior Advisor in Economics of the Pacific Islands Forum (PIF) from the Solomon Islands. He pointed out that a major issue the Pacific region needed to address to reach the sustainable development goals (SDGs) was to consider reforms and policies that strike a balance between supporting livelihoods and reducing future debt risks.

    “Labour Mobility is resulting in increasing remittances to our region,” but Rarawa warned, “It is having an unintended consequence of brain drain with over 54,000 Pacific workers in Australia and New Zealand at the end of last year.”

    All Pacific island nations beyond Papua New Guinea and Fiji have small populations — many have just about 100,000 people, and some, like Nauru, Tuvalu and Kiribati, have just a few thousand.

    Rarawa argues that even though “we may be small in land mass, our combined exclusive economic zone covers nearly 20 percent of the world’s surface as a collective, we control nearly 10 percent of the votes at the United Nations.

    “We are home to over 60 percent of the world’s tuna supply — therefore, we are a region of strategic value”.

    Rarawa believes that good Pacific leadership is needed to exploit this strategic value for the benefit of the people in the Pacific.

    “The current strategic environment we find ourselves in just reinforces and re-emphasize the notion for us to seize the opportunity to strengthen our regional solidarity and leverage our current strategic context to address our collective challenges,” argues Rarawa.

    “We need deeper regionalism (driven by) political leadership and regionalism (with) people-centred development (that) brings improved socio-economic wellbeing by ensuring access to employment, entrepreneurship, trade, finance and investment in the region.”

    Dr Kalinga Seneviratne is a Sri Lanka-born journalist, broadcaster and international communications specialist. He is currently a consultant to the journalism programme at the University of the South Pacific. He is also the former head of research at the Asian Media Information and Communication Center (AMIC) in Singapore. In-Depth News (IDN) is the flagship agency of the non-profit International Press Syndicate.

    This content originally appeared on Asia Pacific Report and was authored by APR editor.

  • PNG’s trade minister ‘fed up’ with Canberra, eyeing China for future

    RNZ Pacific

    Papua New Guinea’s Trade Minister Richard Maru has complained that his country’s trade deal with Australia has been skewed in Canberra’s favour for decades, and suggests the country will trade more with China.

    Minister Maru said Beijing should be PNG’s focus for trade and investment opportunities because not enough was being done to assist PNG’s agriculture exports to Australia.

    Maru is particularly unhappy with agriculture exports, which account for less than two percent of PNG’s exports to Australia, while minerals dominate.

    “Enough is enough,” he said. “Starting this year, we are moving on. We will partner with whatever country that will help us achieve that.

    “We are friends to all and enemies to none. We are not interested in geopolitics.

    “Our main priority is securing the future of our people.”

    Australia is supporting bolstering PNG’s agriculture exports, with Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese earlier this year promising assistance to improve the biosecurity regime that would enable farmers and producers to access international markets.

    To deepen trade with China, a feasibility study is underway to assess the possibility of a free trade agreement (FTA).

    While Australia is PNG’s largest trade partner, China is a close second, coupled with PNG enjoying the largest trade surplus of any of its other trade partners.

    Australia is also pursuing an FTA with Port Moresby, with its own feasibility study to be concluded this month.

    Bougainville flexes legal muscles
    Meanwhile, the President of the autonomous Papua New Guinea region of Bougainville says his government will not allow foreign investors to breach its laws to exploit its people and resources.

    President Ishmael Toroama made the statement as the Bougainville Executive Council refused to grant a mining licence application for a joint-venture involving Wyndale Holdings and its local partners.

    The joint venture wanted to mine in the Eivo/Torau areas as well as the Jaba River middle to lower tailings areas.

    The Bougainville government said in a statement that Wyndale was a private Australian company with links to Australian Nic Zuks which, it said, claimed to have been issued mining licences by the autonomous government.

    President Toroama said the applicants failed to meet the requirements provided by the Bougainville Mining Act 2015.

    He said the ABG would not entertain companies and individuals which used “duplicitous means” to exploit Bougainville’s mineral resources.

    The President also cautioned investors to be wary of being misled and that the ABG would not be held liable for losses incurred as a result of fraudulent misrepresentations.

    This article is republished under a community partnership agreement with RNZ.

    This post was originally published on Asia Pacific Report.