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Category: Australia

  • Australia’s defence – navigating US-China tensions in changing world

    SPECIAL REPORT: By Peter Cronau for Declassified Australia

    Australia is caught in a jam, between an assertive American ally and a bold Chinese trading partner. America is accelerating its pivot to the Indo-Pacific, building up its fighting forces and expanding its military bases.

    As Australia tries to navigate a pathway between America’s and Australia’s national interests, sometimes Australia’s national interest seems to submerge out of view.

    Admiral David Johnston, the Chief of the Australia’s Defence Force, is steering this ship as China flexes its muscle sending a small warship flotilla south to circumnavigate the continent.

    He has admitted that the first the Defence Force heard of a live-fire exercise by the three Chinese Navy ships sailing in the South Pacific east of Australia on February 21, was a phone call from the civilian Airservices Australia.

    “The absence of any advance notice to Australian authorities was a concern, notably, that the limited notice provided by the PLA could have unnecessarily increased the risk to aircraft and vessels in the area,” Johnston told Senate Estimates .

    Johnston was pressed to clarify how Defence first came to know of the live-fire drill: “Is it the case that Defence was only notified, via Virgin and Airservices Australia, 28 minutes [sic] after the firing window commenced?”

    To this, Admiral Johnston replied: “Yes.”

    If it happened as stated by the Admiral — that a live-fire exercise by the Chinese ships was undertaken and a warning notice was transmitted from the Chinese ships, all without being detected by Australian defence and surveillance assets — this is a defence failure of considerable significance.

    Sources with knowledge of Defence spoken to by Declassified Australia say that this is either a failure of surveillance, or a failure of communication, or even more far-reaching, a failure of US alliance cooperation.

    And from the very start the official facts became slippery.

    What did they know and when did they know it
    The first information passed on to Defence by Airservices Australia came from the pilot of a Virgin passenger jet passing overhead the flotilla in the Tasman Sea that had picked up the Chinese Navy VHF radio notification of an impending live-fire exercise.

    The radio transmission had advised the window for the live-fire drill commenced at 9.30am and would conclude at 3pm.

    We know this from testimony given to Senate Estimates by the head of Airservices Australia. He said Airservices was notified at 9.58am by an aviation control tower informed by the Virgin pilot. Two minutes later Airservices issued a “hazard alert” to commercial airlines in the area.

    The Headquarters of the Defence Force’s Joint Operations Command (HJOC), at Bungendore 30km east of Canberra, was then notified about the drill by Airservices at 10.08am, 38 minutes after the drill window had commenced.

    When questioned a few days later, Prime Minister Anthony Albanese appeared to try to cover for Defence’s apparent failure to detect the live-fire drill or the advisory transmission.

    “At around the same time, there were two areas of notification. One was from the New Zealand vessels that were tailing . ..  the [Chinese] vessels in the area by both sea and air,” Albanese stated. “So that occurred and at the same time through the channels that occur when something like this is occurring, Airservices got notified as well.”

    But the New Zealand Defence Force had not notified Defence “at the same time”. In fact it was not until 11.01am that an alert was received by Defence from the New Zealand Defence Force — 53 minutes after Defence HQ was told by Airservices and an hour and a half after the drill window had begun.

    The Chinese Navy’s stealth guided missile destroyer Zunyi
    The Chinese Navy’s stealth guided missile destroyer Zunyi, sailing south in the Coral Sea on February 15, 2025, in a photograph taken from a RAAF P-8A Poseidon surveillance plane. Image: Royal Australian Air Force/Declassified Australia

    Defence Minister Richard Marles later in a round-about way admitted on ABC Radio that it wasn’t the New Zealanders who informed Australia first: “Well, to be clear, we weren’t notified by China. I mean, we became aware of this during the course of the day.

    “What China did was put out a notification that it was intending to engage in live firing. By that I mean a broadcast that was picked up by airlines or literally planes that were commercial planes that were flying across the Tasman.”

    Later the Chinese Ambassador to Australia, Xiao Qian, told ABC that two live-fire training drills were carried out at sea on February 21 and 22, in accordance with international law and “after repeatedly issuing safety notices in advance”.

    Eyes and ears on ‘every move’
    It was expected the Chinese-navy flotilla would end its three week voyage around Australia on March 7, after a circumnavigation of the continent. That is not before finally passing at some distance the newly acquired US-UK nuclear submarine base at HMAS Stirling near Perth and the powerful US communications and surveillance base at North West Cape.

    Just as Australia spies on China to develop intelligence and targeting for a potential US war, China responds in kind, collecting data on US military and intelligence bases and facilities in Australia, as future targets should hostilities commence.

    The presence of the Chinese Navy ships that headed into the northern and eastern seas around Australia attracted the attention of the Defence Department ever since they first set off south through the Mindoro Strait in the Philippines and through the Indonesian archipelago from the South China Sea on February 3.

    “We are keeping a close watch on them and we will be making sure that we watch every move,” Marles stated in the week before the live-fire incident.

    “Just as they have a right to be in international waters . . .  we have a right to be prudent and to make sure that we are surveilling them, which is what we are doing.”

    Around 3500 km to the north, a week into the Chinese ships’ voyage, a spy flight by an RAAF P-8A Poseidon surveillance plane on February 11, in a disputed area of the South China Sea south of China’s Hainan Island, was warned off by a Chinese J-16 fighter jet.

    The Chinese Foreign Ministry responded to Australian protests claiming the Australian aircraft “deliberately intruded” into China’s claimed territorial airspace around the Paracel Islands without China’s permission, thereby “infringing on China’s sovereignty and endangering China’s national security”.

    Australia criticised the Chinese manoeuvre, defending the Australian flight saying it was “exercising the right to freedom of navigation and overflight in international waters and airspace”.

    Two days after the incident, the three Chinese ships on their way to Australian waters were taking different routes in beginning their own “right to freedom of navigation” in international waters off the Australian coast. The three ships formed up their mini flotilla in the Coral Sea as they turned south paralleling the Australian eastern coastline outside of territorial waters, and sometimes within Australia’s 200-nautical-mile (370 km) Exclusive Economic Zone.

    “Defence always monitors foreign military activity in proximity to Australia. This includes the Peoples Liberation Army-Navy (PLA-N) Task Group.” Admiral Johnston told Senate Estimates.

    “We have been monitoring the movement of the Task Group through its transit through Southeast Asia and we have observed the Task Group as it has come south through that region.”

    The Task Group was made up of a modern stealth guided missile destroyer Zunyi, the frigate Hengyang, and the Weishanhu, a 20,500 tonne supply ship carrying fuel, fresh water, cargo and ammunition. The Hengyang moved eastwards through the Torres Strait, while the Zunyi and Weishanhu passed south near Bougainville and Solomon Islands, meeting in the Coral Sea.

    This map indicates the routes taken by the three Chinese Navy ships
    This map indicates the routes taken by the three Chinese Navy ships on their “right to freedom of navigation” voyage in international waters circumnavigating Australia, with dates of way points indicated — from 3 February till 6 March 2025. Distances and locations are approximate. Image: Weibo/Declassified Australia

    As the Chinese ships moved near northern Australia and through the Coral Sea heading further south, the Defence Department deployed Navy and Air Force assets to watch over the ships. These included various RAN warships including the frigate HMAS Arunta and a RAAF P-8A Poseidon intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance plane.

    With unconfirmed reports a Chinese nuclear submarine may also be accompanying the surface ships, the monitoring may have also included one of the RAN’s Collins-class submarines, with their active range of sonar, radar and radio monitoring – however it is uncertain whether one was able to be made available from the fleet.

    “From the point of time the first of the vessels entered into our more immediate region, we have been conducting active surveillance of their activities,” the Defence chief confirmed.

    As the Chinese ships moved into the southern Tasman Sea, New Zealand navy ships joined in the monitoring alongside Australia’s Navy and Air Force.

    The range of signals intelligence (SIGINT) that theoretically can be intercepted emanating from a naval ship at sea includes encrypted data and voice satellite communications, ship-to-ship communications, aerial drone data and communications, as well as data of radar, gunnery, and weapon launches.

    There are a number of surveillance facilities in Australia that would have been able to be directed at the Chinese ships.

    Australian Signals Directorate’s (ASD) Shoal Bay Receiving Station outside of Darwin, picks up transmissions and data emanating from radio signals and satellite communications from Australia’s near north region. ASD’s Cocos Islands receiving station in the mid-Indian ocean would have been available too.

    The Jindalee Operational Radar Network (JORN) over-the-horizon radar network, spread across northern Australia, is an early warning system that monitors aircraft and ship movements across Australia’s north-western, northern, and north-eastern ocean areas — but its range off the eastern coast is not thought to presently reach further south than the sea off Mackay on the Queensland coast.

    Of land-based surveillance facilities, it is the American Pine Gap base that is believed to have the best capability of intercepting the ship’s radio communications in the Tasman Sea.

    Enter, Pine Gap and the Americans
    The US satellite surveillance base at Pine Gap in Central Australia is a US and Australian jointly-run satellite ground station. It is regarded as the most important such American satellite base outside of the USA.

    The spy base – Joint Defence Facility Pine Gap (JDFPG)
    The spy base – Joint Defence Facility Pine Gap (JDFPG) – showing the north-eastern corner of the huge base with some 18 of the base’s now 45 satellite dishes and covered radomes visible. Image: Felicity Ruby/Declassified Australia

    The role of ASD in supporting the extensive US surveillance mission against China is increasingly valued by Australia’s large Five Eyes alliance partner.

    A Top Secret ‘Information Paper’, titled “NSA Intelligence Relationship with Australia”, leaked from the National Security Agency (NSA) by Edward Snowden and published by ABC’s Background Briefing, spells out the “close collaboration” between the NSA and ASD, in particular on China:

    “Increased emphasis on China will not only help ensure the security of Australia, but also synergize with the U.S. in its renewed emphasis on Asia and the Pacific . . .   Australia’s overall intelligence effort on China, as a target, is already significant and will increase.”

    The Pine Gap base, as further revealed in 2023 by Declassified Australia, is being used to collect signals intelligence and other data from the Israeli battlefield of Gaza, and also Ukraine and other global hotspots within view of the US spy satellites.

    It’s recently had a significant expansion (reported by this author in The Saturday Paper) which has seen its total of satellite dishes and radomes rapidly increase in just a few years from 35 to 45 to accommodate new heightened-capability surveillance satellites.

    Pine Gap base collects an enormous range and quantity of intelligence and data from thermal imaging satellites, photographic reconnaissance satellites, and signals intelligence (SIGINT) satellites, as expert researchers Des Ball, Bill Robinson and Richard Tanter of the Nautilus Institute have detailed.

    These SIGINT satellites intercept electronic communications and signals from ground-based sources, such as radio communications, telemetry, radar signals, satellite communications, microwave emissions, mobile phone signals, and geolocation data.

    Alliance priorities
    The US’s SIGINT satellites have a capability to detect and receive signals from VHF radio transmissions on or near the earth’s surface, but they need to be tasked to do so and appropriately targeted on the source of the transmission.

    For the Pine Gap base to intercept VHF radio signals from the Chinese Navy ships, the base would have needed to specifically realign one of those SIGINT satellites to provide coverage of the VHF signals in the Tasman Sea at the time of the Chinese ships’ passage. It is not known publicly if they did this, but they certainly have that capability.

    However, it is not only the VHF radio transmission that would have carried information about the live-firing exercise.

    Pine Gap would be able to monitor a range of other SIGINT transmissions from the Chinese ships. Details of the planning and preparations for the live-firing exercise would almost certainly have been transmitted over data and voice satellite communications, ship-to-ship communications, and even in the data of radar and gunnery operations.

    But it is here that there is another possibility for the failure.

    The Pine Gap base was built and exists to serve the national interests of the United States. The tasking of the surveillance satellites in range of Pine Gap base is generally not set by Australia, but is directed by United States’ agencies, the National Reconnaissance Office (NRO) together with the US Defense Department, the National Security Agency (NSA), and Central Intelligence Agency (CIA).

    Australia has learnt over time that US priorities may not be the same as Australia’s.

    Australian defence and intelligence services can request surveillance tasks to be added to the schedule, and would have been expected to have done so in order to target the southern leg of the Chinese Navy ships’ voyage, when the ships were out of the range of the JORN network.

    The military demands for satellite time can be excessive in times of heightened global conflict, as is the case now.

    Whether the Pine Gap base was devoting sufficient surveillance resources to monitoring the Chinese Navy ships, due to United States’ priorities in Europe, Russia, the Middle East, Africa, North Korea, and to our north in the South China Sea, is a relevant question.

    It can only be answered now by a formal government inquiry into what went on — preferably held in public by a parliamentary committee or separately commissioned inquiry. The sovereign defence of Australia failed in this incident and lessons need to be learned.

    Who knew and when did they know
    If the Pine Gap base had been monitoring the VHF radio band and heard the Chinese Navy live-fire alert, or had been monitoring other SIGINT transmissions to discover the live-fire drill, the normal procedure would be for the active surveillance team to inform a number of levels of senior officers, a former Defence official familiar with the process told Declassified Australia.

    Inside an operations room at the Australian Signals Directorate (ASD)
    Inside an operations room at the Australian Signals Directorate (ASD) head office at the Defence complex at Russell Hill in Canberra. Image: ADF/Declassified Australia

    Expected to be included in the information chain are the Australian Deputy-Chief of Facility at the US base, NSA liaison staff at the base, the Australian Signals Directorate head office at the Defence complex at Russell Hill in Canberra, the Defence Force’s Headquarters Joint Operations Command, in Bungendore, and the Chief of the Defence Force. From there the Defence Minister’s office would need to have been informed.

    As has been reported in media interviews and in testimony to the Senate Estimates hearings, it has been stated that Defence was not informed of the Chinese ships’ live-firing alert until a full 38 minutes after the drill window had commenced.

    The former Defence official told Declassified Australia it is vital the reason for the failure to detect the live-firing in a timely fashion is ascertained.

    Either the Australian Defence Force and US Pine Gap base were not effectively actively monitoring the Chinese flotilla at this time — and the reasons for that need to be examined — or they were, but the information gathered was somewhere stalled and not passed on to correct channels.

    If the evidence so far tendered by the Defence chief and the Minister is true, and it was not informed of the drill by any of its intelligence or surveillance assets before that phone call from Airservices Australia, the implications need to be seriously addressed.

    A final word
    In just a couple of weeks the whole Defence environment for Australia has changed, for the worse.

    The US military announces a drawdown in Europe and a new pivot to the Indo-Pacific. China shows Australia it can do tit-for-tat “navigational freedom” voyages close to the Australian coast. US intelligence support is withdrawn from Ukraine during the war. Australia discovers the AUKUS submarines’ arrival looks even more remote. The prime minister confuses the limited cover provided by the ANZUS treaty.

    Meanwhile, the US militarisation of Australia’s north continues at pace. At the same time a senior Pentagon official pressures Australia to massively increase defence spending. And now, the country’s defence intelligence system has experienced an unexplained major failure.

    Australia, it seems, is adrift in a sea of unpredictable global events and changing alliance priorities.

    Peter Cronau is an award-winning, investigative journalist, writer, and film-maker. His documentary, The Base: Pine Gap’s Role in US Warfighting, was broadcast on Australian ABC Radio National and featured on ABC News. He produced and directed the documentary film Drawing the Line, revealing details of Australian spying in East Timor, on ABC TV’s premier investigative programme Four Corners. He won the Gold Walkley Award in 2007 for a report he produced on an outbreak of political violence in East Timor. This article was first published by Declassified Australia and is republished here with the author’s permission.

    This post was originally published on Asia Pacific Report.

  • No apologies over fabricated terror plot from pollies or lobby groups

    COMMENTARY: By Greg Barns

    When it comes to antisemitism, politicians in Australia are often quick to jump on the claim without waiting for evidence.

    With notable and laudable exceptions like the Greens and independents such as Tasmanian federal MP Andrew Wilkie, it seems any allegation will do when it comes to the opportunity to imply Arab Australians, the Muslim community and Palestinian supporters are trying to destroy the lives of the Jewish community.

    A case in point. The discovery in January this year of a caravan found in Dural, New South Wales, filled with explosives and a note that referenced the Great Synagogue in Sydney led to a frenzy of clearly uninformed and dangerous rhetoric from politicians and the media about an imminent terrorist attack targeting the Jewish community.

    It was nothing of the sort as we now know with the revelation by police that this was a “fabricated terrorist plot”.

    As the ABC reported on March 10: “Police have said an explosives-laden caravan discovered in January at Dural in Sydney’s north-west was a ‘fake terrorism plot’ with ties to organised crime”, and that “the Australian Federal Police said they were confident this was a ‘fabricated terrorist plot’,” adding the belief was held “very early on after the caravan was located”.

    One would have thought the political and media class would know that it is critical in a society supposedly underpinned by the rule of law that police be allowed to get on with the job of investigating allegations without comment.

    Particularly so in the hot-house atmosphere that exists in this nation today.

    Opportunistic Dutton
    But not the ever opportunistic and divisive federal opposition leader Peter Dutton.

    After the Daily Telegraph reported the Dural caravan story on January 29,  Dutton was quick to say that this “was potentially the biggest terrorist attack in our country’s history”. To his credit, Prime Anthony Albanese said in response he does not “talk about operational matters for an ongoing investigation”.

    Dutton’s language was clearly designed to whip up fear and hysteria among the Jewish community and to demonise Palestinian supporters.

    He was not Robinson Crusoe sadly. New South Wales Premier Chris Minns told the media on January 29 that the Dural caravan discovery had the potential to have led to a “mass casualty event”.

    The Zionist Federation of Australia, an organisation that is an unwavering supporter of Israel despite the horror that nation has inflicted on Gaza, was even more overblown in its claims.

    It issued a statement that claimed: “This is undoubtedly the most severe threat to the Jewish community in Australia to date. The plot, if executed, would likely have resulted in the worst terrorist attack on Australian soil.”

    Note the word “undoubtedly”.

    Uncritical Israeli claims
    Then there was another uncritical Israel barracker, Sky News’ Sharri Markson, who claimed; “To think perpetrators would have potentially targeted a museum commemorating the Holocaust — a time when six million Jews were killed — is truly horrifying.”

    And naturally, Jilian Segal, the highly partisan so-called “Antisemitism Envoy” said the discovery of the caravan was a “chilling reminder that the same hatred that led to the murder of millions of Jews during the Holocaust still exists today”.

    In short, the response to the Dural caravan incident was simply an exercise in jumping on the antisemitism issue without any regard to the consequences for our community, including the fear it spread among Jewish Australians and the further demonising of the Arab Australian community.

    No circumspection. No leadership. No insistence that the matter had not been investigated fully.

    As the only Jewish organisation that represents humanity, the Jewish Council of Australia, said in a statement from its director Sarah Schwartz on March 10 the “statement from the AFP [Australian Federal Police] should prompt reflection from every politician, journalist and community leader who has sought to manipulate and weaponise fears within the Jewish community.

    ‘Irresponsible and dangerous’
    “The attempt to link these events to the support of Palestinians — whether at protests, universities, conferences or writers’ festivals — has been irresponsible and dangerous.” Truth in spades.

    And ask yourself this question. Let’s say the Dural caravan contained notes about mosques and Arab Australian community centres. Would the media, politicians and others have whipped up the same level of hysteria and divisive rhetoric?

    The answer is no.

    One assumes Dutton, Segal, the Zionist Federation and others who frothed at the mouth in January will now offer a collective mea culpa. Sadly, they won’t because there will be no demands to do so.

    The damage to our legal system has been done because political opportunism and milking antisemitism for political ends comes first for those who should know better.

    Greg Barns SC is national criminal justice spokesperson for the Australian Lawyers Alliance. This article was first published by Pearls and Irritations social policy journal and is republished with permission.

    This post was originally published on Asia Pacific Report.

  • Australia seeks GMLRS AW rockets for army’s HIMARS

    Australia has requested to buy 54 Guided Multiple Launch Rocket System (GMLRS) Alternate Warhead (AW) rockets worth US$91.2 million under the Foreign Military Sales (FMS) scheme, the Defense Security Cooperation Agency (DCSA) announced on 10 March. According to the DSCA, the proposed deal – which has already been approved by the US Department of State […]

    The post Australia seeks GMLRS AW rockets for army’s HIMARS appeared first on Asian Military Review.

    This post was originally published on Asian Military Review.

  • Call for fresh Blue Pacific rules-based order: ‘Our home, our rules’

    COMMENTARY: By Sione Tekiteki and Joel Nilon

    Ongoing wars and conflict around the world expose how international law and norms can be co-opted. With the US pulling out again from the Paris Climate Agreement, and other international commitments, this volatility is magnified.

    And with the intensifying US-China rivalry in the Pacific posing the real risk of a new “arms race”, the picture becomes unmistakable: the international global order is rapidly shifting and eroding, and the stability of the multilateral system is increasingly at risk.

    In this turbulent landscape, the Pacific must move beyond mere narratives such as the “Blue Pacific” and take bold steps toward establishing a set of rules that govern and protect the Blue Pacific Continent against outside forces.

    If not, the region risks being submerged by rising geopolitical tides, the existential threat of climate change and external power projections.

    For years, the US and its allies have framed the Pacific within the “Indo-Pacific” strategic construct — primarily aimed at maintaining US primacy and containing a rising and more ambitious China. This frame shapes how nations in alignment with the US have chosen to interpret and apply the rules-based order.

    On the other side, while China has touted its support for a “rules-based international order”, it has sought to reshape that system to reflect its own interests and its aspirations for a multipolar world, as seen in recent years through international organisations and institutions.

    In addition, the Taiwan issue has framed how China sets its rules of engagement with Pacific nations — a diplomatic redline that has created tension among Pacific nations, contradicting their long-held “friends to all, enemies to none” foreign policy preference, as evidenced by recent diplomatic controversies at regional meetings.

    Confusing and divisive
    For Pacific nations these framings are confusing and divisive — they all sound the same but underneath the surface are contradictory values and foreign policy positions.

    For centuries, external powers have framed the Pacific in ways that advance their strategic interests. Today, the Pacific faces similar challenges, as superpowers compete for influence — securitising and militarising the region according to their ambitions through a host of bilateral agreements. This frame does not always prioritise Pacific concerns.

    Rather it portrays the Pacific as a theatre for the “great game” — a theatre which subsequently determines how the Pacific is ordered, through particular value-sets, processes, institutions and agreements that are put in place by the key actors in this so-called game.

    But the Pacific has its own story to tell, rooted in its “lived realities” and its historical, cultural and oceanic identity. This is reflected in the Blue Pacific narrative — a vision that unites Pacific nations through shared values and long-term goals, encapsulated in the 2050 Strategy for the Blue Pacific Continent.

    The Pacific has a proud history of crafting rules to protect its interests — whether through the Rarotonga Treaty for a nuclear-free zone, leading the charge for the Paris Climate Agreement or advocating for SDG 14 on oceans. Today, the Pacific continues to pursue “rules-based” climate initiatives (such as the Pacific Resilience Facility), maritime boundaries delimitation, support for the 2021 and 2023 Forum Leaders’ Declarations on the Permanency of Maritime Boundaries and the Continuation of Statehood in the face of sea level rise, climate litigation through the International Court of Justice and the International Tribunal for the Law of the Sea, and a host of other rules-based regional environmental, economic and social initiatives.

    However, these efforts often exist in isolation, lacking a cohesive framework to bring them all together, and to maximise their strategic impact and leverage. Now must be the time to build on these successes and create an integrated, long-term, visionary, Pacific-centric “rules-based order”.

    This could start by looking to consolidate existing Pacific rules: exploring opportunities to take forward the rules through concepts like the Ocean of Peace currently being developed by the Pacific Islands Forum, and expanding subsequently to include something like a “code of conduct” for how Pacific nations should interact with one another and with outside powers.

    Responding as united bloc
    This would enable them to respond more effectively and operate as a united bloc, in contrast to the bilateral approach preferred by many partners.

    Over time this rules-based approach could be expanded to include other areas — such as the ongoing protection and preservation of the ocean, inclusive of deep-sea mining; the maintenance of regional peace and security, including in relation to the peaceful resolution of conflict and demilitarisation; and movement towards greater economic, labour and trade integration.

    Such an order would not only provide stability within the Pacific but also contribute to shaping global norms. It would serve as a counterbalance to external strategic frames that look to define the rules that ought to be applied in the Pacific, while asserting the position of the Pacific nations in global conversations.

    This is not about diminishing Pacific sovereignty but about enhancing it — ensuring that the region’s interests are safeguarded amid the geopolitical manoeuvring of external powers, and the growing wariness in and of US foreign policy.

    The Pacific’s geopolitical challenges are mounting, driven by climate change, shifting global power dynamics and rising tensions between superpowers. But a collective, rules-based approach offers a pathway forward.

    Cohesive set of standards
    By building on existing frameworks and creating a cohesive set of standards, the Pacific can assert its autonomy, protect its environment and ensure a stable future in an increasingly uncertain world.

    The time to act is now, as Pacific nations are increasingly being courted, and before it is too late. This implies though that Pacific nations have honest discussions with each other, and with Australia and New Zealand, about their differences and about the existing challenges to Pacific regionalism and how it can be strengthened.

    By integrating regional arrangements and agreements into a more comprehensive framework, Pacific nations can strengthen their collective bargaining power on the global stage — while in the long-term putting in place rules that would over time become a critical part of customary international law.

    Importantly, this rules-based approach must be guided by Pacific values, ensuring that the region’s unique cultural, environmental and strategic interests are preserved for future generations.

    Sione Tekiteki is a senior lecturer at the Auckland University of Technology. He previously served at the Pacific Islands Forum Secretariat in three positions over nine years, most recently as director, governance and engagement. Joel Nilon is currently senior Pacific fellow at the Pacific Security College at the Australian National University. He previously served at the Pacific Islands Forum Secretariat for nine years as policy adviser.  The article was written in close consultation with Professor Transform Aqorau, vice-chancellor of Solomon Islands National University. Republished from DevBlog with permission.

    This post was originally published on Asia Pacific Report.

  • Thousands in Melbourne rally for International Women’s Day, Gaza

    By Mary Merkenich in Naarm/Melbourne

    More than 2000 people — mostly women and union members — marked International Women’s Day two days early last week on March 6 with a lively rally and march in Melbourne, capital of the Australian state of Victoria.

    Chants of “Women united will never be defeated”, “Tell me what a feminist looks like? This is what a feminist looks like” and “When women’s rights are under attack, what do we do? Stand up! Fight back!” rang through the streets.

    Speakers addressed the inequality women still faced at work and in society, the leading roles women play in many struggles for justice, including for First Nations rights, against the junta in Myanmar, against Israel’s genocide in Gaza/Palestine, and against oppressive regimes like that in Iran.


    “Palestine is not for sale.”  Video: Green Left

    When Michelle O’Neill, president of the Australian Council of Trade Unions (ACTU) spoke, some women chanted “CFMEU” to demonstrate their displeasure at the ACTU’s complicity in attacks against that union.

    The rally also marched to Victoria’s Parliament House.

    Republished from Green Left.

    in Auckland, Aotearoa New Zealand, activists marked International Women’s Day on Saturday and the start of Ramadan this week with solidarity rallies across the country, calling for justice and peace for Palestinian women and the territories occupied illegally by Israel.

    The theme this year for IWD was “For all women and girls: Rights. Equality. Empowerment” and this was the 74th week of Palestinian solidarity protests.

    The IWD protesters at the Victorian Parliament
    The IWD protesters at the Victorian Parliament. Image: Jordan AK/Green Left

    This post was originally published on Asia Pacific Report.

  • Complicity in the Mass Murder of Children, Women, and Men

    I have sent the following Letter to major Australian media and to nearly all Federal and Victorian State MPs:

    Mainstream Western media (e.g. the BBC) have published the estimate in the leading medical journal The Lancet that violent (direct) deaths in Gaza totalled 64,260 in 9 months i.e. 111,000 by the Ceasefire on 20 January 2025. However they resolutely ignore expert estimates also published in The Lancet that non-violent (indirect) deaths from imposed deprivation may be 4 times greater, this indicating Gaza deaths from violence and imposed deprivation totalling about 553,000 or 23% of the pre-war population by 20 January 2025. Noting that under-5 infants are 70% of avoidable deaths from deprivation in impoverished countries (Gideon Polya, “Body Count. Global avoidable mortality since 1950”), it is estimated that these deaths include those of 393,000 children, 51,000 women and 113,000 men. As is my duty I have informed nearly all Federal and Victorian State MPs. The only MPs consistently demanding an immediate and permanent Ceasefire and an end to the deadly Occupation have been the Greens and several Independents (notably Senators Lidia Thorpe and Fatima Payman). Silence is complicity. Informed Australians voting for Gaza Genocide-complicit Labor, the worse Coalition and indeed nearly all non-Green candidates are complicit in the mass murder of children, women and men (cc MPs).

  • See also “Western Media and Politician Complicity in US-Israeli Massacre of Palestinian Children” by Gideon Polya, Dissident Voice, 8 February 8th, 2024.
    • The post Complicity in the Mass Murder of Children, Women, and Men first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • First Huntsman artillery systems shown off in Australian camouflage

    Hanwha Defence Australia (HDA) has formally unveiled the first LAND 8116 programme AS9 Huntsman 155mm self-propelled howitzers (SPHs) and AS10 armoured ammunition resupply vehicle (AARV) in Australian Army Auscam markings at its Hanwha Armoured Vehicle Centre of Excellence (H-ACE) facility on 27 February. The first batch of vehicles, comprising two AS9 SPHs and one AS10 […]

    The post First Huntsman artillery systems shown off in Australian camouflage appeared first on Asian Military Review.

    This post was originally published on Asian Military Review.

  • Australian university workers: ‘We will not be silenced over Palestine’

    SPECIAL REPORT: By Markela Panegyres and Jonathan Strauss in Sydney

    The new Universities Australia (UA) definition of antisemitism, endorsed last month for adoption by 39 Australian universities, is an ugly attempt to quash the pro-Palestine solidarity movement on campuses and to silence academics, university workers and students who critique Israel and Zionism.

    While the Scott Morrison Coalition government first proposed tightening the definition, and a recent joint Labor-Coalition parliamentary committee recommended the same, it is yet another example of the Labor government’s overreach.

    It seeks to mould discussion in universities to one that suits its pro-US and pro-Zionist imperialist agenda, while shielding Israel from accountability.

    So far, the UA definition has been widely condemned.

    Nasser Mashni, of Australia Palestine Advocacy Network, has slammed it as “McCarthyism reborn”.

    The Jewish Council of Australia (JCA) has criticised it as “dangerous, politicised and unworkable”. The NSW Council of Civil Liberties said it poses “serious risks to freedom of expression and academic freedom”.

    The UA definition comes in the context of a war against Palestinian activism on campuses.

    The false claim that antisemitism is “rampant” across universities has been weaponised to subdue the Palestinian solidarity movement within higher education and, particularly, to snuff out any repeat of the student-led Gaza solidarity encampments, which sprung up on campuses across the country last year.

    Some students and staff who have been protesting against the genocide since October 2023 have come under attack by university managements.

    Some students have been threatened with suspension and many universities are giving themselves, through new policies, more powers to liaise with police and surveil students and staff.

    Palestinian, Arab and Muslim academics, as well as other anti-racist scholars, have been silenced and disciplined, or face legal action on false counts of antisemitism, merely for criticising Israel’s genocidal war on Palestine.

    Randa Abdel-Fattah, for example, has become the target of a Zionist smear campaign that has successfully managed to strip her of Australian Research Council funding.

    Intensify repression
    The UA definition will further intensify the ongoing repression of people’s rights on campuses to discuss racism, apartheid and occupation in historic Palestine.

    By its own admission, UA acknowledges that its definition is informed by the antisemitism taskforces at Columbia University, Stanford University, Harvard University and New York University, which have meted out draconian and violent repression of pro-Palestine activism.

    The catalyst for the new definition was the February 12 report tabled by Labor MP Josh Burns on antisemitism on Australian campuses. That urged universities to adopt a definition of antisemitism that “closely aligns” with the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) definition.

    It should be noted that the controversial IHRA definition has been opposed by the National Tertiary Education Union (NTEU) for its serious challenge to academic freedom.

    As many leading academics and university workers, including Jewish academics, have repeatedly stressed, criticism of Israel and criticism of Zionism is not antisemitic.

    UA’s definition is arguably more detrimental to freedom of speech and pro-Palestine activism and scholarship than the IHRA definition.

    In the vague IHRA definition, a number of examples of antisemitism are given that conflate criticism of Israel with antisemitism, but not the main text itself.

    By contrast, the new UA definition overtly equates criticism of Israel and Zionism with antisemitism and claims Zionist ideology is a component part of Jewish identity.

    The definition states that “criticism of Israel can be anti-Semitic . . . when it calls for the elimination of the State of Israel”.

    Dangerously, anyone advocating for a single bi-national democratic state in historic Palestine will be labelled antisemitic under this new definition.

    Anyone who justifiably questions the right of the ethnonationalist, apartheid and genocidal state of Israel to exist will be accused of antisemitism.

    Sweeping claims
    The UA definition also makes the sweeping claim that “for most, but not all Jewish Australians, Zionism is a core part of their Jewish identity”.

    But, as the JCA points out, Zionism is a national political ideology and is not a core part of Jewish identity historically or today, since many Jews do not support Zionism. The JCA warns that the UA definition “risks fomenting harmful stereotypes that all Jewish people think in a certain way”.

    Moreover, JCA said, Jewish identities are already “a rightly protected category under all racial discrimination laws, whereas political ideologies such as Zionism and support for Israel are not”.

    Like other aspects of politics, political ideologies, such as Zionism, and political stances, such as support for Israel, should be able to be discussed critically.

    According to the UA definition, criticism of Israel can be antisemitic “when it holds Jewish individuals or communities responsible for Israel’s actions”.

    While it would be wrong for any individual or community, because they are Jewish, to be held responsible for Israel’s actions, it is a fact that the International Criminal Court (ICC) has issued arrest warrants for Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his former  minister Yoav Gallant for Israel’s war crimes and crimes against humanity.

    But under the UA definition, since Netanyahu and Gallant are Jewish, would holding them responsible be considered antisemitic?

    Is the ICC antisemitic? According to Israel it is.

    The implication of the definition for universities, which teach law and jurisprudence, is that international law should not be applied to the Israeli state, because it is antisemitic to do so.

    The UA’s definition is vague enough to have a chilling effect on any academic who wants to teach about genocide, apartheid and settler-colonialism. It states that “criticism of Israel can be antisemitic when it is grounded in harmful tropes, stereotypes or assumptions”.

    What these are is not defined.

    Anti-racism challenge
    Within the academy, there is a strong tradition of anti-racism and decolonial scholarship, particularly the concept of settler colonialism, which, by definition, calls into question the very notion of “statehood”.

    With this new definition of antisemitism, will academics be prevented from teaching students the works of Chelsea Watego, Patrick Wolfe or Edward Said?

    The definition will have serious and damaging repercussions for decolonial scholars and severely impinges the rights of scholars, in particular First Nations scholars and students, to critique empire and colonisation.

    UA is the “peak body” for higher education in Australia, and represents and lobbies for capitalist class interests in higher education.

    It is therefore not surprising that it has developed this particular definition, given its strong bilateral relations with Israeli higher education, including signing a 2013 memorandum of understanding with Association of University Heads, Israel.

    It should be noted that the NTEU National Council last October called on UA to withdraw from this as part of its Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions resolution.

    All university students and staff committed to anti-racism, academic freedom and freedom of speech should join the campaign against the UA definition.

    Local NTEU branches and student groups are discussing and passing motions rejecting the new definition and NTEU for Palestine has called a National Day of Action for March 26 with that as one of its key demands.

    We will not be silenced on Palestine.

    Jonathan Strauss and Markela Panegyres are members of the National Tertiary Education Union and the Socialist Alliance. Republished from Green Left with permission.

    This post was originally published on Asia Pacific Report.

  • Marshall Islands signs treaty banning nuclear weapons in the South Pacific

    RNZ Pacific

    The Marshall Islands has become the 14th Pacific Islands Forum (PIF) member state to join the South Pacific’s nuclear non-proliferation and disarmament treaty.

    The agreement, known as the Treaty of Rarotonga, was signed in Majuro during the observance of Nuclear Victims Remembrance Day on Monday.

    The Pacific Islands Forum said the historic signing of the treaty on March 3 — seven decades after the most powerful nuclear weapons tests ever conducted — underscored the Marshall Islands’ enduring commitment to nuclear disarmament and non-proliferation.

    “By becoming a signatory to the Treaty of Rarotonga, the Marshall Islands has indicated its intention to be bound with a view to future ratification,” the PIF said.

    “This reinforces the region’s collective stand towards a nuclear-free Pacific as envisaged by the Rarotonga Treaty and the 2050 Strategy for the Blue Pacific Continent.”

    PIF Secretary-General Baron Waqa, who is in Majuro, welcomed the move.

    “This step demonstrates the nation’s unwavering commitment to nuclear disarmament,” he said.

    ‘Marshall Islands bears brunt of nuclear testing’
    “Marshall Islands continues to bear the brunt of nuclear testing, and this signing is a testament to Forum nations’ ongoing advocacy for a safe, secure, and nuclear-weapon-free region.”

    The Rarotonga Treaty was opened for signature on 6 August 1985 and entered into force on 11 December 1986.

    It represents a key regional commitment to nuclear non-proliferation and disarmament, contributing to global efforts to eliminate the threat of nuclear proliferation.

    The decision by the Marshall Islands to sign the Rarotonga Treaty carries profound importance given its history and ongoing advocacy for nuclear justice, the PIF said.

    Current member states of the treaty are Australia, Cook Islands, Fiji, Kiribati, Nauru, New Zealand, Niue, Papua New Guinea, Samoa, Solomon Islands, Tonga, Tuvalu and Vanuatu.

    ‘We are committed’, says Heine
    “In our commitment to a world free of the dangers of nuclear weapons and for a safe and secure Pacific, today, we take a historic step by signing our accession to the South Pacific Nuclear Free Zone Treaty, also known as the Rarotonga Treaty,” President Hilda Heine said.

    “We recognise that the Marshall Islands has yet to sign onto several key nuclear-related treaties, including the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons (TPNW), largely due to our unique historical and geopolitical circumstances.

    “However, we are committed to reviewing our positions and where it is in the best interest of the RMI and its people, we will take the necessary steps toward accession.

    “In the spirit of unity and collaboration, we look forward to the results of an independent study of nuclear contamination in the Pacific,” she added.

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

    This post was originally published on Asia Pacific Report.

  • ‘Back off AUKUS’, Greens MP Tuiono warns NZ in wake of Trump row

    Asia Pacific Report

    The Green Party has called on Prime Minister Christopher Luxon to rule out Aotearoa New Zealand joining the AUKUS military technical pact in any capacity following the row over Ukraine in the White House over the weekend.

    President Donald Trump’s “appalling treatment” of his Ukrainian counterpart Volodymyr Zelenskyy was a “clear warning that we must avoid AUKUS at all costs”, said Green Party foreign affairs and Pacific issues spokesperson Teanau Tuiono.

    “Aotearoa must stand on an independent and principled approach to foreign affairs and use that as a platform to promote peace.”

    US President Donald Trump has paused all military aid for Ukraine after the “disastrous” Oval Office meeting with President Zelenskyy in another unpopular foreign affairs move that has been widely condemned by European leaders.

    Oleksandr Merezhko, the chair of Ukraine’s Parliamentary Foreign Affairs Committee, declared that Trump appeared to be trying to push Kyiv to capitulate on Russia’s terms.

    He was quoted as saying that the aid pause was worse than the 1938 Munich Agreement that allowed Nazi Germany to annex part of Czechoslovakia.

    ‘Danger of Trump leadership’
    Tuiono, who is the Green Party’s first tagata moana MP, said: “What we saw in the White House at the weekend laid bare the volatility and danger of the Trump leadership — nothing good can come from deepening our links to this administration.

    “Christopher Luxon should read the room and rule out joining any part of the AUKUS framework.”

    Tuiono said New Zealand should steer clear of AUKUS regardless of who was in the White House “but Trump’s transactional and hyper-aggressive foreign policy makes the case to stay out stronger than ever”.

    “Our country must not join a campaign that is escalating tensions in the Pacific and talking up the prospects of a war which the people of our region firmly oppose.

    “Advocating for, and working towards, peaceful solutions to the world’s conflicts must be an absolute priority for our country,” Tuiono said.

    Five Eyes network ‘out of control’
    Meanwhile, in the 1News weekly television current affairs programme Q&A, former Prime Minister Helen Clark challenged New Zealand’s continued involvement in the Five Eyes intelligence network, describing it as “out of control”.

    Her comments reflected growing concern by traditional allies and partners of the US over President Trump’s handling of long-standing relationships.

    Clark said the Five Eyes had strayed beyond its original brief of being merely a coordinating group for intelligence agencies in the US, Canada, UK, Australia, and New Zealand.

    “There’s been some talk in the media that Trump might want to evict Canada from it . . . Please could we follow?” she said.

    “I mean, really, the problem with Five Eyes now has become a basis for policy positioning on all sorts of things.

    “And to see it now as the basis for joint statements, finance minister meetings, this has got a bit out of control.”

    This post was originally published on Asia Pacific Report.

  • Political analyst hopes NZ, Australia will ‘step up’ over USAID cuts gap

    By Koroi Hawkins, RNZ Pacific editor

    The Trump administration’s decision to eliminate more than 90 percent of the US Agency for International Development (USAID) funding means “nothing’s safe right now,” a regional political analyst says.

    President Donald Trump’s government has said it is slashing about US$60 billion in overall US development and humanitarian assistance around the world to further its America First policy.

    Last September, the former Deputy Secretary of State Kurt Campbell said that Washington had “listened carefully” to Pacific Island nations and was making efforts to boost its diplomatic footprint in the region.

    Campbell had announced that the US contributed US$25 million to the Pacific-owned and led Pacific Resilience Facility — a fund endorsed by leaders to make it easier for Forum members to access climate financing for adaptation, disaster preparedness and early disaster response projects.

    However, Trump’s move has been said to have implications for the Pacific, which is one of the most aid-dependent regions in the world.

    Research fellow at the Australian National University’s Development Policy Centre Dr Terence Wood told RNZ Pacific Waves that, in the Pacific, the biggest impacts of the aid cut are likley to be felt by the three island nations in a Compact of Free Association (COFA) with the US.

    He said that while the compact “is safe” for three COFA states – Federated States of Micronesia, Marshall Islands, and Palau – “these are unprecedented times”.

    “It would be unprecedented if the US just tore them up. But then again, the United States is showing very little regard for agreements that it has entered into in the past, so I would say that nothing’s safe right now.”

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


    Dr Terence Wood speaking to RNZ Pacific Waves.   Video: RNZ Pacific


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

    This post was originally published on Radio Free.

  • Activists scale NZ building in protest against global weapons company

    By Kate Green , RNZ News reporter

    Protesters have scaled the building of an international weapons company in Rolleston, Christchurch, in resistance to it establishing a presence in Aotearoa New Zealand.

    Two people from the group Peace Action Ōtautahi were on the roof of the NIOA building on Stoneleigh Drive, shown in a photo on social media, and banners were strung across the exterior.

    Banners declared “No war profiteers in our city. NIOA supplies genocide” and “Shut NIOA down”.

    In late December, the group hung a banner across the Bridge of Remembrance in a similar protest.

    In 2023, the global munitions company acquired Barrett Firearms Manufacturing, an Australian-owned, US-based manufacturer of firearms and ammunition operating out of Tennessee.

    According to the company’s website, its products are “used by civilian sport shooters, law enforcement agencies, the United States military and more than 80 State Department approved countries across the world”.

    In a media release, Peace Action Ōtautahi said the aim was to highlight the alleged killing of innocent civilians with weapons supplied by NIOA.

    NIOA has been approached for comment.

    Police confirm action
    A police spokesperson said they were aware of the protest, and confirmed two people had climbed onto the roof, and others were surrounding the premises.

    In a later statement, police said the people on the ground had moved. However, the two protesters remained on the roof.

    “We are working to safely resolve the situation, and remove people from the roof,” they said.

    “While we respect the right to lawful protest, our responsibility is to uphold the law and ensure the safety of those involved.”

    Fire and Emergency staff were also on the scene, alongside the police Public Safety Unit and negotiation team.

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

    This post was originally published on Asia Pacific Report.

  • Rheinmetall completes HX tactical truck deliveries to Australian Defence Force

    Rheinmetall MAN Military Vehicles Australia (RMMVA) announced on 20 February that it has completed the delivery of its HX range of tactical military trucks to the Australian Defence Force (ADF). The Final Acceptance ceremony took place at Rheinmetall’s Military Vehicles Center of Excellence (MILVEHCOE) in Queensland, the company said. According to the announcement, RMMVA has […]

    The post Rheinmetall completes HX tactical truck deliveries to Australian Defence Force appeared first on Asian Military Review.

    This post was originally published on Asian Military Review.

  • Manipulated media: The weapon of the Right

    The re-election of Donald Trump is proof that the Right’s most powerful weapon is media manipulation, ensuring the public sphere is not engaged in rational debate, reports the Independent Australia.

    COMMENTARY: By Victoria Fielding

    I once heard someone say that when the Left and the Right became polarised — when they divorced from each other — the Left got all the institutions of truth including science, education, justice and democratic government.

    The Right got the institution of manipulation: the media. This statement hit me for six at the time because it seemed so clearly true.

    What was also immediately clear is that there was an obvious reason why the Left sided with the institutions of truth and the Right resorted to manipulation. It is because truth does not suit right-wing arguments.

    The existence of climate change does not suit fossil fuel billionaires. Evidence that wealth does not trickle down does not suit the capitalist class. The idea that diversity, equity and inclusion (yes, I put those words in that order on purpose) is better for everyone, rather than a discriminatory, hateful, destructive, divided unequal world is dangerous for the Right to admit.

    The Right’s embrace of the media institution also makes sense when you consider that the institutions of truth are difficult to buy, whereas billionaires can easily own manipulative media.

    Just ask Elon Musk, who bought Twitter and turned it into a political manipulation machine. Just ask Rupert Murdoch, who is currently engaged in a bitter family war to stop three of his children opposing him and his son Lachlan from using their “news” organisations as a form of political manipulation for right-wing interests.

    Right-wingers also know that truthful institutions only have one way of communicating their truths to the public: via the media. Once the media environment is manipulated, we enter a post-truth world.

    Experts derided as untrustworthy ‘elitists’
    This is the world where billionaire fossil fuel interests undermine climate action. It is where scientists create vaccines to save lives but the manipulated public refuses to take them. Where experts are derided as untrustworthy “elitists”.

    And it is where the whole idea of democratic government in the US has been overthrown to install an autocratic billionaire-enriching oligarchy led by an incompetent fool who calls himself the King.

    Once you recognise this manipulated media environment, you also understand that there is not — and never has been — such as thing as a rational public debate. Those engaged in the institutions of the Left — in science, education, justice and democratic government — seem mostly unwilling to accept this fact.

    Instead, they continue to believe if they just keep telling people the truth and communicating what they see as entirely rational arguments, the public will accept what they have to say.

    I think part of the reason that the Left refuses to accept that public debate is not rational and rather, is a manipulated bin fire of misleading information, including mis/disinformation and propaganda, is because they are not equipped to compete in this reality. What do those on the Left do with “post-truth”?

    They seem to just want to ignore it and hope it goes away.

    A perfect example of this misunderstanding of the post-truth world and the manipulated media environment’s impact on the public is this paper, by political science professors at the Australian National University Ian McAllister and Nicholas Biddle.

    Stunningly absolutist claim
    Their research sought to understand why polling at the start of the 2023 Indigenous Voice to Parliament Referendum showed widespread public support for the Voice but over the course of the campaign, this support dropped to the point where the Voice was defeated with 60 per cent voting “No” and 40 per cent, “Yes”.

    In presenting their study’s findings, the authors make the stunningly absolutist claim that:

    ‘…the public’s exposure to all forms of mass media – as we have measured it here – had no impact on the result’.

    A note is then attached to this finding with the caveat:

    ‘As noted earlier, given the data at hand we are unable to test the possibility that the content of the media being consumed resulted in a reinforcement of existing beliefs and partisanship rather than a conversion.’

    This caveat leaves a gaping hole in the finding by failing to account for how media reinforcing existing beliefs is an important media effect – as argued by Neil Gavin here. Since it was not measured, how can they possibly say there was no effect?

    Furthermore, the very premise of the author’s sweeping statement that media exposure had no impact on the result of the Referendum is based on two naive assumptions:

    • that voters were rational in their deliberations over the Referendum question; and
    • that the information environment voters were presented with was rational.

    Dual assumption of rationality
    This dual assumption of rationality – one that the authors interestingly admit is an assumption – is evidenced in their hypothesis which states:

    ‘Voters who did not follow the campaign in the mass media were more likely to move from a yes to a no vote compared to voters who did follow the campaign in the mass media.’

    This hypothesis, the authors explain, is premised on the assumption ‘that those with less information are more likely to opt for the status quo and cast a no vote’, and therefore that less exposure to media would change a vote from “Yes” to “No”.How the media failed Australia in the Referendum 'campaign'What this hypothesis assumes is that if a voter received more rational information in the media about the Referendum, that information would rationally drive their vote in the “Yes” direction. When their data disproved this hypothesis, the authors used this finding to claim that the media had no effect.

    To understand the reality of what happened in the Referendum debate, the word “rational” needs to be taken out of the equation and the word “manipulated” put in.

    We know, of course, that the Referendum was awash with manipulative information, which all supported the “No” campaign. For example, my study of News Corp’s Voice coverage — Australia’s largest and most influential news organisation — found that News Corp actively campaigned for the “No” proposition in concert with the “No” campaign, presenting content more like a political campaign than traditional journalism and commentary.

    A study by Queensland University of Technology’s Tim Graham analysed how the Voice Referendum was discussed on social media platform, X. Far from a rational debate, Graham identified that the “No” campaign and its supporters engaged in a participatory disinformation propaganda campaign, which became a “truth market” about the Voice.

    The ‘truth market’
    This “truth market” was described as drawing “Yes” campaigners into a debate about the truth of the Voice, sidetracking them from promoting their own cause.

    What such studies showed was that, far from McAllister and Biddle’s assumed rational information environment, the Voice Referendum public debate was awash with manipulation, propaganda, disinformation and fear-mongering.

    The “No” campaign that delivered this manipulation perfectly demonstrates how the Right uses media to undermine institutions of truth, to undermine facts and to undermine the rationality of democratic debates.

    The completely unfounded assumption that the more information a voter received about the Voice, the more likely they would vote “Yes”, reveals a misunderstanding of the reality of a manipulated public debate environment present across all types of media, from mainstream news to social media.

    It also wrongly treats voters like rational deliberative computers by assuming that the more information that goes in, the more they accept that information. This is far from the reality of how mediated communication affects the public.

    The reason the influence of media on individuals and collectives is, in reality, so difficult to measure and should never be bluntly described as having total effect or no effect, is that people are not rational when they consume media, and every individual processes information in their own unique and unconscious ways.

    One person can watch a manipulated piece of communication and accept it wholeheartedly, others can accept part of it and others reject it outright.

    Manipulation unknown
    No one piece of information determines how people vote and not every piece of information people consume does either. That’s the point of a manipulated media environment. People who are being manipulated do not know they are being manipulated.

    Importantly, when you ask individuals how their media consumption impacted on them, they of course do not know. The decisions people make based on the information they have ephemerally consumed — whether from the media, conversations, or a wide range of other information sources, are incredibly complex and irrational.

    Surely the re-election of Donald Trump for a second time, despite all the rational arguments against him, is proof that the manipulated media environment is an incredibly powerful weapon — a weapon the Right, globally, is clearly proficient at wielding.

    It is time those on the Left caught up and at least understood the reality they are working in.

    Dr Victoria Fielding is an Independent Australia columnist. This article was first published by the Independent Australia and is republished with the author’s permission.

    This post was originally published on Asia Pacific Report.

  • Jewish Council slams Australian universities’ ‘dangerous, politicised’ antisemitism definition

    Asia Pacific Report

    An independent Jewish body has condemned the move by Australia’s 39 universities to endorse a “dangerous and politicised” definition of antisemitism which threatens academic freedom.

    The Jewish Council of Australia, a diverse coalition of Jewish academics, lawyers, writers and teachers, said in a statement that the move would have a “chilling effect” on legitimate criticism of Israel, and risked institutionalising anti-Palestinian racism.

    The council also criticised the fact that the universities had done so “without meaningful consultation” with Palestinian groups or diverse Jewish groups which were critical of Israel.

    The definition was developed by the Group of Eight (Go8) universities and adopted by Universities Australia.

    “By categorising Palestinian political expression as inherently antisemitic, it will be unworkable and unenforceable, and stifle critical political debate, which is at the heart of any democratic society,” the Jewish Council of Australia said.

    “The definition dangerously conflates Jewish identities with support for the state of Israel and the political ideology of Zionism.”

    The council statement said that it highlighted two key concerns:

    Mischaracterisation of criticism of Israel
    The definition states: “Criticism of Israel can be antisemitic when it is grounded in harmful tropes, stereotypes or assumptions and when it calls for the elimination of the State of Israel or all Jews or when it holds Jewish individuals or communities responsible for Israel’s actions.”

    The definition’s inclusion of “calls for the elimination of the State of Israel” would mean, for instance, that calls for a single binational democratic state, where Palestinians and Israelis had equal rights, could be labelled antisemitic.

    Moreover, the wording around “harmful tropes” was dangerously vague, failing to distinguish between tropes about Jewish people, which were antisemitic, and criticism of the state of Israel, which was not, the statement said.

    Misrepresentation of Zionism as core to Jewish identity
    The definition states that for most Jewish people “Zionism is a core part of their Jewish identity”.

    The council said it was deeply concerned that by adopting this definition, universities would be taking and promoting a view that a national political ideology was a core part of Judaism.

    “This is not only inaccurate, but is also dangerous,” said the statement.

    “Zionism is a political ideology of Jewish nationalism, not an intrinsic part of Jewish identity.

    “There is a long history of Jewish opposition to Zionism, from the beginning of its emergence in the late-19th century, to the present day. Many, if not the majority, of people who hold Zionist views today are not Jewish.”

    In contrast to Zionism and the state of Israel, said the council, Jewish identities traced back more than 3000 years and spanned different cultures and traditions.

    Jewish identities were a rightly protected category under all racial discrimination laws, whereas political ideologies such as Zionism and support for Israel were not, the council said.

    Growing numbers of dissenting Jews
    “While many Jewish people identify as Zionist, many do not. There are a growing number of Jewish people worldwide, including in Australia, who disagree with the actions of the state of Israel and do not support Zionism.

    “Australian polling in this area is not definitive, but some polls suggest that 30 percent of Australian Jews do not identify as Zionists.

    “A recent Canadian poll found half of Canadian Jews do not identify as Zionist. In the United States, more and more Jewish people are turning away from Zionist beliefs and support for the state of Israel.”

    Sarah Schwartz, a human rights lawyer and the Jewish Council of Australia’s executive officer, said: “It degrades the very real fight against antisemitism for it to be weaponised to silence legitimate criticism of the Israeli state and Palestinian political expressions.

    “It also risks fomenting division between communities and institutionalising anti-Palestinian racism.”

    This post was originally published on Asia Pacific Report.

  • J’accuse!… the Jew who accuses his fellow Jews of being antisemites

    A rally on the steps of the Victorian Parliament under the banner of Jews for a Free Palestine was arranged for Sunday, February 9. At 11:11pm on the eve of that rally, Mark Leibler —a  lawyer who claims to have a high profile and speak on behalf of Jews by the totally unelected organisation AIJAC — put out a tweet on X (and paid for an advertisement of the same posting) as follows:

    COMMENTARY: By Jeffrey Loewenstein

    As someone Jewish, the son of Holocaust survivors and members of whose family were murdered by the Nazis, it is hard to know whether to characterise Mark Leibler’s tweet as offensive, appalling, contemptuous, insulting or a disgusting, shameful and grievous introduction of the Holocaust, and those who were murdered by the Nazis, into his tweet — or all of the foregoing!

    Leibler’s tweet is most likely a breach of recently passed legislation in Australia, both federally and in various state Parliaments, making hateful words and actions, and doxxing, criminal offences. It will be “interesting” to see how the police deal with the complaint taken up with the police alleging Leibler’s breach of the legislation.

    In the end, Leibler’s attempted intimidation of those who might have been thinking of going to the rally failed — miserably!

    There are many Jews who abhor what Israel is doing in Gaza (and the West Bank) but feel intimidated by the Leiblers of this world who accuse them of being antisemitic for speaking out against Israel’s actions and not those rusted-on 100 percent supporters of Israel who blindly and uncritically support whatever Israel does, however egregious.

    Leibler, and others like him, who label Jews as antisemites because they dare speak out about Israel’s actions, certainly need to be called out.

    As a lawyer, Leibler knows that actions have consequences. A group of concerned Jews (this writer included) are in the process of lodging a complaint about Leibler’s tweet with the Commonwealth Human Rights Commission.

    Separately from that, this week will see full-page adverts in both the Sydney Morning Herald and The Age — signed by hundreds of Jews — bearing the heading:

    “Australia must reject Trump’s call for the removal of Palestinians from Gaza. Jewish Australians say NO to ethnic cleansing.”

    Jeffrey Loewenstein, LLB, was a member of the Victorian Bar and a one-time chair of the Anti-Defamation Commission and member of the Jewish Community Council of Victoria. This article was first published by Pearls & Irritations public policy journal and is republished here with permission.

    This post was originally published on Asia Pacific Report.

  • Gloominess and Magical Thinking

    Never allow intelligence chiefs to speak publicly. Their prerogative lies in lying, their reassurance, cool deception. While the attractions of transparency are powerful, the result of a garrulous spook is always going to be unreliable.

    In Australia, a comically looking individual by the name of Mike Burgess terrorises and terrifies the local populace as head of the Australian Secret Intelligence Organisation (ASIO), the domestic spy agency. It will surprise no one familiar with this approach that it resembles several that have come before. Keep them frightened, soften them for the next encroaching round, and await ever larger budgets for the already fattened calf known as the national security state.

    In his 2025 threat assessment, the chief tries to be bracingly calm and reassuring, even as he delivers the frightening blows. “Fortunately, I was born with the glass-half-full gene.” He tells us the agency is “always looking ahead”, which is encouraging. Prior to making that point, he says that he had “focused on past and present threats.” With pointless contradiction assured, the theme is set for clotting clichés, grammatical torments and trying formulations. “This year’s Assessment is future focused. And I think it’s fair to say it’s the most significant, serious and sober address so far.”

    Those wishing to waste their unrecoverable time listening to the address then realise that the agency has become a victim of public relations capture and trend shopping. Sections have been created that would make your run of the mill moronic university manager sigh. There is, for instance, a “Futures Team” (think “Future Fellows” or “Deans of the Future” – their reality is never the now but always deferred) that supposedly “pours over classified intelligence, reviews open source information, consults experts and uses structured analytical techniques to develop in-depth assessments about future trajectories and vulnerabilities.”

    The only thing missing from this froth is the use of artificial intelligence (appropriate for ASIO), which is bound to do the job as competently as any in the “Futures Team”. For all we know, this is already being done, the machine component triumphant, the human minds lazily tempted.

    The predictable banalities follow in the Burgess show. “Australia has entered a period of strategic surprise and security fragility.” If so, Australia has been entering for a very lengthy period, given the number of addresses Burgess has given. Like an academic who rises to the top on the strength of one idea and one paper eternally rewritten, the director can be relied upon to bore with ideas that have come before, ribboned and stringed for effect. “Over the next five years, a complex, challenging and changing security environment will become more dynamic, more diverse and more degraded.”

    The Australian public, it would seem, is not playing along with the authorities. How dare they question and debate the norms they have been told are so sacred to servile stability? “Social cohesion” – a vacuous term – is apparently eroding. Institutions are no longer trusted, while intolerance grows. Truth is being assailed (Burgess is a true comic as spy chief), “undermined by conspiracy, mis- and disinformation.” For an entity that specialises in all three, this is fabulously funny.

    The terrifying world, it would seem, is replete with “multifaceted, merging, intersecting, concurrent and cascading threats.” He is concerned “about young Australians being caught up in webs of hate, both religiously and ideologically motivated”. There is a sense that individuals are seeking “hybrid beliefs”, cherry-picked from a garden of tempting varieties. Environmentalists of the left commune with Hitler in their beliefs. Islamic State propaganda converses with neo-Nazi dogma. Students of history will hardly find these couplings odd, but looking ahead will do that to you.

    In terms of concrete threats, one is singled out as numinous. One can only cringe at the identification of what Burgess calls “the A-team”. This mysterious “Australia team” is supposedly dedicated to combing “professional networking sites for Australians with access to privileged information, and then use false, anglicised personas to approach their targets.” Their targets are offered “consulting opportunities” and generous sums for reporting on Australian trade, politics, economics, foreign policy, defence and security. This does really sound like money poorly spent by the “A-team”, but who are we to judge? Some people are evidently living it up.

    Magical thinking also figures in domestic spy land. We find that questioning the imbecilic foreign policy decision by Australian governments to purchase and construct fantasy nuclear-propelled submarines as servitors of the US empire is bound to be the product of “foreign interference”. The agency “has identified foreign services seeking to target AUKUS to position themselves to collect the capabilities, how Australia intends to use them, and to undermine the confidence of our allies.”

    In his 2024 address, Burgess quotes the words of Labor Prime Minister Ben Chifley to the Australian Parliament after establishing ASIO: “It is not usual to discuss the detailed activities of a security service. Much of the value of such a service lies in the fact that it works quietly. Members of the organisation should not be unduly prominent at cocktail parties, but should devote themselves to the tasks allotted to them.”

    Burgess, ever the funny man, then takes a stab at humour, claiming to be more permissive than the former Australian PM: “given the work my people do, I would never begrudge them the odd cocktail party now and then”. If only his agents, and Burgess, spent more time at such events and less time babbling on the stage, we would all be better off.

    The post Gloominess and Magical Thinking first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • Cowardice and Cancellation: Creative Australia and the Venice Biennale

    Cowardice is the milk that runs in the veins of many event organisers, especially when it comes to those occasions that might provoke the unmanaged unexpected.  The same organisers will claim to be open minded, accommodating to stirring debate, and open to what is trendily termed in artistic lingo as “provocations”.

    The dropping by Creative Australia of Lebanese-born artist Khaled Sabsabi as Australia’s representative for the 2026 Venice Biennale, along with the curator of the pavilion’s artistic team, Michael Dagostino, shows that true artistic subversion is not the game, and uncontroversial subservience the form.  If an arts body fears that the milch cow will be starved, if not killed altogether, they will slight, blight and drop the artist in question and prostrate before Mammon’s moneyed throne.

    In Australia’s febrile, philistine and increasingly hysterical atmosphere on matters controversial, debate that supposedly tests what is tepidly termed social cohesion has been cut and mauled to the point of non-recognition.  Journalists are given to following strict talking points on matters of international interest, from President Donald Trump (criticism of all his moves, marvellous) to the issue of Israel (criticism, not quite so marvellous, entailing avoidance of such words as “massacre”, “genocide”, “ethnic cleansing”).

    Criticism of Israel’s policies in levelling Gaza and creating an open-air theatre of massacre in real time have led agitating voices in both Israel and Australia to claim that the demon of antisemitism is more virulent than usual.  Threats have been inflated and the opposition leader, Peter Dutton, inspired to secure votes in the months leading up to the federal election.  A pathology has taken root, from art circles to universities.

    It began with an intervention by the Australian newspaper, an outlet that Israel can rely on as its pro bono propagandistic emissary down under.  The paper’s sympathetic correspondent, Yoni Bashan, had been embedded with Israeli forces in Gaza.  After receiving a number of messages, Bashan took an interest in Creative Australia’s choice for the biennale, thinking he had scored a coup by going through Sabsabi’s previous work.  This preschool hackwork found a 2007 video installation titled You, which features Hassan Nasrallah, the former leader of the Lebanese Shiite militia group Hezbollah.

    Nasrallah, whose voice and image appears in the montage, was slain in the latest conflict between Israel and Hezbollah.  The buffoonish, hatchet assessment (“I’m not an arts reporter,” Bashan conceded in a podcast, calling the art industry “a bit too fluty for me”) claimed that Creative Australia’s selection of Sabsabi was a “creative form of racism”.  Instead of understanding the broader context of the horrors of war which Sabsabi has been preoccupied with, himself a refugee from the Lebanese civil war, the paper was thrilled to have uncovered a terrorist sympathiser.

    The falsely revelatory nature of the Australian’s intervention, coupled with a discussion in the Australian Parliament that also scorned a 2006 video titled Thank you very much showing the 9/11 attacks and then US President George W. Bush, was pitifully juvenile.  Tony Burke’s expression of shock was craven, a capitulation that necessitates his immediate resignation as Minister for the Arts.  Within hours of the parliamentary exchange – one could hardly call it a debate – Creative Australia convened an emergency board meeting that unanimously endorsed cancelling the contract regarding the Venice Biennale representation featuring Sabsabi and Dagostino.  It had taken all but six days from the announcement that praised the artist’s work for exploring “human collectiveness” and questioning “identity politics and ideology, inviting audiences to do the same.”

    Thankfully, this indecent chapter did provoke resignations and stinging criticism.  Mikala Tai, an important figure in Creative Australia’s visual arts departments over the last four years, wrote to Chief Executive Adrian Collette stating that she had resigned “in support of the artist.”

    To the list of resignations can be added artist and board member, Lindy Lee and Simon Mordant, twice commissioner at the Venice Biennale, who told ABC Arts that he “immediately resigned” his role and terminated financial support. “There was a question asked in parliament [on Thursday, February 13] and that subsequently resulted in an unprecedented move by Creative Australia to rescind the contract.”  For Mordant, he could not think of any other situation “in any country in the world” where something of this nature had happened, and “certainly” not in Australia.

    To its credit, Sydney’s Museum of Contemporary Art (MCA), which accepted You and exhibited it in 2009, rightly wondered how the decision was reached.  In a statement to the Australian Financial Review on February 21, the gallery expressed concern with “the lack of transparency in Creative Australia’s process.”  The decision had “major ramifications for the arts in Australia and the reputation of Australia in the world at a time when creating space for diverse artist voices and ideas has never been more important.”

    Other galleries have been committedly cowardly and silent on the decision, even those whose funding does not depend on Creative Australia.  The Art Gallery of NSW, which ran Sabsabi’s solo show in 2019, is a case in point, merely stating that it was “not commenting on this matter at this time”.  Liz Ann Macgregor, who ran the MCA for over two decades till 2021, offers a cast iron reason for the cringeworthy reticence.  “I think people are second-guessing that they might upset some of their donors if they say something.”

    The teams shortlisted to join the biennale pavilion were also keen to express their views in an open letter addressed to the Creative Australia board.  “We believe that revoking support for the current Australian artist and curator representatives for Venice Biennale 2026 is antithetical to the goodwill and hard-fought artistic independence, freedom of speech and moral courage that is at the core of arts in Australia, which plays a crucial role in our thriving and democratic nation.”

    The letter goes on to ask the salient question.  “If Creative Australia cannot even stand by its expert-led selection for a matter of hours, abandoning its own process at the first sign of pressure, then what does that say about its commitment to artistic excellence and freedom of expression?”  The answer: everything.

    The post Cowardice and Cancellation: Creative Australia and the Venice Biennale first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • Terminating Neighbours (Again)

    Soppy, soapy and interminable, the Australian series Neighbours, the staple for millions of British (and Australian) watchers for years, their tonic and medication from reality, is being terminated for the second time.

    In 2022, steady followers and dedicated fanatics of this program of irritating suburban geniality were met with the news that Channel 5 would be concluding its support for a series that had incubated such Australian performers and thespians as Margot Robbie, Guy Pearce and Kylie Minogue.  Fremantle Media, the program’s producer, had failed to secure another broadcaster in the UK as a replacement, despite the 1.5 million regular viewers that would tune in each day it was run.

    Then came Amazon MGM Studios, which decided to give a blast of oxygen to the 37-year-old relic that had already passed 9,000 episodes.  It took a mere four months to do so, possibly helped by the ratings for what was meant to be a farewell episode studded with stars.  The streaming service Prime Video became the conduit, the new program returning as Neighbours: A New Chapter.

    Salvation jobs tend to be rare in show business, and the whole industry remains inherently and manically brutal.  A sure signal that Neighbours might be in trouble was the 2024 move by Amazon to cease its Freevee service, which had been responsible for broadcasting the revived variant globally.

    The language being used in this latest withdrawal of support is an object study in euphemistic endings.  “We are sad to announce that Neighbours will be resting from December 2025,” read an official statement on the program on February 21.  But the viewers were assured that the axe, while inevitable in its deployment, would not do away with those episodes scheduled to run on the global Amazon Prime Video channel, and Australia’s Channel Ten four times a week until then.  These would still have “all the big soapie twists and turns that our viewers love”.

    A spokesperson for Amazon, in confirming the company’s withdrawal of support, stood by the remit in saying little on the reasons behind the decision.  The language used was that of putting down a beloved pet that had endured that bit longer because of a noble intervention.  “Forty years is an incredible milestone and we are proud that Amazon MGM Studios was able to have a small part of bringing further episodes to Freevee and Prime Video customers over the last two years, spanning 400 episodes.”

    Things were left to Neighbour’s executive producer, Jason Herbison, to soften matters and offer a sliver of hope.  First, there was the soap’s enduring popularity in the UK.  There was also the show’s first Daytime Emmy nomination in 2024.  “As this chapter closes, we appreciate and thank Amazon MGM Studios for all they have done for Neighbours – bringing this iconic and much-loved series to new audiences globally.  We value how much the fans love Neighbours and we believe there are more stories of the residents of Ramsay Street to tell in the future.”

    These stories will remain either in cold storage or floating in purgatory unless an international backer can be found.  It fills barrels of irony that Australia’s longest running soap drama would need the broadcasting heft from overseas to sustain it.  The Australian backer, Channel Ten, claims that funding it alone will not pass muster.

    Placed in that precarious situation, the program’s success does not merely depend on a steadfast series of ratings in one market.  Neighbours, with its sedate, soft treading approach to human relations in a fictional Melbourne suburb, appeals in a very specific way to British audiences.  For them, this is Australia imagined as sun, pools and conviviality.  Disputes irk but are eventually resolved.  As the BBC press release described it in October 1986, the show “is down-to-earth, centres on ordinary families, with a particular emphasis on young people and the problems they face.”

    When the wedding of Scott and Charlene, played respectively by Jason Donovan and Kylie Minogue, aired in 1988, 19.7 million British viewers tuned in.  This was stupendous for a production that had initially been savaged for its corniness, comical awfulness and its seeming inertia.  It was also the sort of success that enraged critics for challenging the enduring supremacy of Britain’s own EastEnders and Coronation Street.

    The actual city of the program’s setting is irreverent in terms of weather, teasing, toying and frustrating the visitor with lengthy spells of overcast doom, occasional spits of rain, and then, variable temperatures.  The latter phenomenon drives the local resident to travel equipped with a wardrobe of clothing options: raincoat, warm jacket, short sleeved shirts.  Ramsay Street, with its particular pretentious brand of sunny friendliness, should have been located in Sydney, though this remains the unmentionable heresy.

    Taking the temperature of the broader public reaction to the decision, and bafflement abounds.  Why would, asked one follower of the program, take away “YOUR number one show!” screeched one at Amazon.  But Amazon, according to The Sun, was not happy with its broader returns.  It is a global beast with global appetites, a coded way of saying that success, to be genuine, had to be an American one.

    An unnamed source (of course), told the paper that Fremantle had been given “two years to see if it worked, but sadly, they just didn’t get the viewers.”  Fremantle’s hunt for the cash for continued production will have to start in earnest, but short of returning to a British backer, the prospects look decidedly final for a show that has lasted well beyond its time.

    The post Terminating Neighbours (Again) first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • Flights between Australia, NZ diverted because of Chinese drills

    Several commercial flights between Australia and New Zealand had to divert on Friday because of a live-fire exercise conducted by Chinese warships, according to media reports.

    The Associated Press quoted Australian Foreign Minister Penny Wong as saying that Canberra had warned international airlines flying between the two countries to beware of the Chinese live-fire exercise in the Tasman Sea. Commercial pilots had been informed of potential hazards in the airspace.

    Several international flights had been diverted as a result, the Australian Broadcasting Corporation reported without giving details.

    It was not clear if the exercise had finished. The Chinese military has not commented on it.

    The Tasman Sea between southeast Australia and New Zealand.
    The Tasman Sea between southeast Australia and New Zealand.
    (Google Maps)

    A Chinese navy task group, including the frigate Hengyang, cruiser Zunyi and replenishment vessel Weishanhu, is believed to have conducted the live-fire exercise.

    The Australian airline Qantas and its budget affiliate Jetstar had adjusted some flights across the Tasman Sea between Australia and New Zealand, media reported.

    Australia’s Civil Aviation Authority and the air traffic control agency Airservices Australia “are aware of reports of live firing in international waters,” the latter said in a statement quoted by Reuters news agency.

    Although the live-fire exercise was observed in international waters, airlines with flights over the area were still advised to take precaution, it said.

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    Short notice

    China had only notified Australian authorities about the exercise off the coast of New South Wales state earlier on Friday, according to the Sydney Morning Herald.

    “We will be discussing this with the Chinese, and we already have at officials’ level, in relation to the notice given and the transparency, that has been provided in relation to these exercises, particularly the live fire exercises,” Wong was quoted as saying.

    The Chinese task group has been operating near Australia since last week.

    On Thursday, the Australian defense department said the Chinese ships were spotted 150 nautical miles (276 kilometers) from Sydney, well inside Australia’s exclusive economic zone.

    Some naval vessels were deployed to monitor the Chinese warships’ movements, given they were just exercising freedom of navigation under international law, the department said.

    Some Australian analysts warned of the Chinese navy normalizing its presence and power projection overseas but Chinese media dismissed those concerts as “hype”, saying it was a normal part of the navy’s far seas drills.

    Edited by Mike Firn


    This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by RFA Staff.

    This post was originally published on Radio Free.

  • Aussie Government Invests in Cultivated Meat Startup with A$100K Grant

    magic valley
    4 Mins Read

    Magic Valley, a Melbourne-based producer of cultivated meat, has received A$100,000 in government funding to scale up production and drive down costs.

    Aussie food tech startup Magic Valley has secured A$100,000 ($62,800) from the national government to transition from research to commercial production of cultivated meat.

    The grant is part of the A$392M Industry Growth Program (IGP), which aligns with the government’s National Reconstruction Fund priorities, including agricultural value-adding and low-emissions technologies.

    The investment will help Magic Valley, which specialises in cultivated pork and lamb, accelerate production, optimise bioprocessing, and drive down costs, which it says are key steps on its path to market.

    How Magic Valley makes its cultivated meat

    lab grown meat australia
    Courtesy: Magic Valley

    Founded in 2020 by CEO Paul Bevan, Magic Valley unveiled a cultivated lamb product in 2022, targeting one of the most polluting products in the food system (it ranks only behind beef and dark chocolate). It then ventured into cultivated pork with a minced product, which the startup has indicated it can produce for A$8 per kg.

    Magic Valley’s technology doesn’t require fetal bovine serum, and taps into induced pluripotent stem cells (iPSCs). It takes a small sample of skin cells from a living animal, which are expanded and turned into iPSCs, which in turn can be converted into muscle and fat.

    The cells are grown in a bioreactor, in a mixture of water, amino acids, and other nutrients. They’re harvested after a few weeks and turned into meat products. These can be made over and over again from the original cell sample, since the iPSCs can grow in an unlimited way.

    According to the company, its process can reduce its proteins’ emissions by 92%, land use by 95%, and water use by 78% compared to their conventional counterparts.

    In 2023, it collaborated with Washington-based Biocellion SPC to enhance its bioreactor design and optimise production, and expanded into a new pilot facility at bio-innovator and incubator Co-Labs. This plant can house bioreactors with a capacity of up to 3,000 litres, allowing it to potentially produce 150,000 kgs of cultivated meat annually.

    lab grown pork
    Courtesy: Magic Valley

    Magic Valley hosted a public tasting for its cultivated pork in April, serving it as part of baos at John Gorilla Café in Brunswick, Victoria. It has also hosted a televised tasting on Australia’s Channel 7 network, and appeared on Gordon Ramsay’s Food Stars Australia.

    While cultivated lamb is a relatively niche category, there are several startups working on cultivated pork, including Meatable, Ivy Farm Technologies, Mission Barns, Fork & Good, Simple Planet, MyriaMeat, Mewery, and Meatiply.

    Banking on Australia’s tapered appetite for meat

    It was one of five startups to receive the latest round of grants under the IGP, which supports small and medium-sized businesses that play a crucial role in the economy but can find it difficult to come to market. The scheme focuses on several verticals, from renewables and medical science to defence and agriculture.

    IGP supports enterprises in commercialising their ideas, growing their operations, expanding to national and international markets, and better positioning themselves to secure future investment and scaling opportunities.

    lab grown meat australia
    Courtesy: Magic Valley

    “This funding turbocharges our ability to scale. We’re not just making meat – we’re creating the future of food. And this support from the Australian government signals that they believe in that future too,” said Bevan.

    It comes at a time when more and more Australians are cutting back on meat, with 42% now either reducing or not consuming animal protein at all. Last year alone, a quarter had lowered their meat intake, and another 14% were planning to do so too.

    However, a 2023 survey of Australians and New Zealanders found that 74% weren’t familiar with cultivated meat, while only 24% would readily incorporate it into their diets (and 48% said they wouldn’t do so). Research also shows that when it comes to alternative protein policies, Australia ranks bottom on the list of the 10 most supportive governments in Asia-Pacific. So investments like the one in Magic Valley are a welcome step.

    australia meat consumption
    Courtesy: Food Frontier

    While Cass Materials, Infinite Bioworks, and Smart MCs are all developing products and services to help manufacturers make cultivated meat, the only two companies actively producing these proteins are Magic Valley and Vow.

    The latter is already selling its cultivated quail and foie gras in Singapore and Hong Kong, and is awaiting approval from Food Standards Australia New Zealand. Magic Valley has indicated that it was working closely with the regulator on the compliance and safety of its cultivated pork, and previously suggested that it could commercially launch the product this year.

    The post Aussie Government Invests in Cultivated Meat Startup with A$100K Grant appeared first on Green Queen.

    This post was originally published on Green Queen.

  • Australia protests to China about ‘unsafe’ aircraft maneuver over Paracels

    Australia and China traded blame over an incident above the disputed Paracel archipelago in the South China Sea, adding to an already volatile situation in the region.

    On Feb. 11, a Royal Australian Air Force P-8A Poseidon maritime patrol aircraft experienced an “unsafe and unprofessional interaction” with a Chinese J-16 fighter aircraft, the Australian Defence Force, or defense department, said in a statement.

    The P-8A Poseidon was conducting a routine maritime surveillance patrol in the South China Sea at the time, it said.

    Australia said the Chinese aircraft had released flares close to the Australian aircraft.

    “This was an unsafe and unprofessional maneuver that posed a risk to the aircraft and personnel,” the Australian department said.

    No crew member was injured in the incident and the aircraft was not damaged but Australia said it “expects all countries, including China, to operate their militaries in a safe and professional manner.”

    Australian Defense Minister Richard Marles told Sky News that the Chinese J-16 was “so close that there’s no way you could have been able to ensure that the flares did not hit the P-8.”

    “Had any of those flares hit the P-8, that would have definitely had the potential for significant damage to that aircraft,” he said.

    Flares, when fired at an aircraft at close proximity, could get into the engine and cause the plane to crash. Yet they are regularly used by the People’s Liberation Army Air Force against foreign assets.

    In May 2024, Australia protested to China after one of its fighter jets intercepted and dropped flares close to an Australian helicopter in international waters in the Yellow Sea.

    In late October 2023, a Chinese warplane also used flares against a Canadian shipborne maritime helicopter over the South China Sea.

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    Disputed Paracel islands

    China rejected Australia’s latest complaint, saying the Australian military aircraft “deliberately intruded into China’s airspace over Xisha Qundao.”

    The archipelago that China calls Xisha, known internationally as the Paracel islands, is claimed by China, Vietnam and Taiwan.

    It has been under Beijing’s control since 1974 when Chinese troops took it from South Vietnam in a battle that killed 74 Vietnamese sailors.

    Chinese foreign ministry spokesperson Guo Jiakun said the Australian aircraft’s operation “violated China’s sovereignty and harmed our national security.”

    “China’s response to warn away the airplane was legitimate, lawful, professional and restrained,” Guo said. “Our message is quite clear: stop the provocations and infringement on China’s sovereignty, and stop turning the South China Sea into a less peaceful and stable place.”

    Defense Ministry Spokesperson Zhang Xiaogang accused Australia of “spreading false narratives.”

    “It should be pointed out that the Australian military aircraft ignored the main road in the South China Sea and intruded into other people’s homes,” Zhang told reporters.

    “China’s expulsion of them is completely reasonable, legal and beyond reproach, and is a legitimate defense of national sovereignty and security,” he added.

    The P-8A Poseidon’s surveillance patrol is a normal activity that does not violate any regulations, said Abdul Rahman Yaacob, research fellow at Australia’s Lowy Institute think tank.

    “Australia has an interest in an open and free maritime domain as it is an island,” Rahman told Radio Free Asia. “Also the Paracel archipelago is a disputed territory, China’s claims over it were rejected by an international tribunal in 2016 so legally China doesn’t have the right to respond aggressively like that.”

    Separately from the protest, the Australian defense department issued a note on Chinese vessels operating in waters to the north of Australia.

    People’s Liberation Army-Navy Jiangkai-class frigate Hengyang in Australia's exclusive economic zone on Feb. 11, 2025.
    People’s Liberation Army-Navy Jiangkai-class frigate Hengyang in Australia’s exclusive economic zone on Feb. 11, 2025.
    (Australian Defence Force)

    PLA naval task group near Australia

    The department said it could confirm the Chinese warships were the PLA Navy’s Jiangkai-class frigate Hengyang, the Renhai cruiser Zunyi and the Fuchi-class replenishment vessel Weishanhu.

    The Henyang is a guided-missile frigate carrying medium-range air defense and anti-submarine missiles, as well as sophisticated radar and sonar systems. The Zunyi is a stealth guided-missile destroyer of the Type 055 class, considered one of the most capable surface combatants in the world.

    The three ships are believed not to have intruded into Australian territorial waters and only transited its exclusive economic zone, or EEZ – the sea boundary that extends 200 nautical miles (370 km) from the coast.

    “They could be trying to familiarize themselves with the waters around Australia,” said Lowy’s Abdul Rahman Yaacob. “But the most likely reason is to test Australian surveillance capabilities, such as how fast can Australia detect their movements.”

    Rahman said Chinese submarine drones had long been suspected to be operating in Indonesian and Philippine waters.

    “I would not discount that in the future we may find Chinese submarine drones operating close to or within Australia’s EEZ.” he said.

    In 2022, Chinese spy ship Haiwangxing was tracked within 50 nautical miles of Australia’s west coast after crossing into its EEZ, setting off alarms.

    In the latest development, U.S. Indo-Pacific commander Adm. Samuel Paparo is expected to visit Canberra next week, reported the Australian Broadcasting Corporation, adding that Paparo is the man in charge of U.S. preparations for any conflict with China.

    New Pentagon chief Pete Hegseth, meanwhile, said that his country was shifting military priorities from Europe’s security to deterring war with China in the Pacific, according to media reports.

    Edited by Mike Firn.


    This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by RFA Staff.

    This post was originally published on Radio Free.

  • In the quest to appease Israel, the media undermine our basic rights

    In its eagerness to appease supporters of Israel, the media is happy to ride roughshod over due process and basic rights. It’s damaging Australia’s (and New Zealand’s?) democracy.

    COMMENTARY: By Bernard Keane

    Two moments stand out so far from the Federal Court hearings relating to Antoinette Lattouf’s sacking by the ABC, insofar as they demonstrate how power works in Australia — and especially in Australia’s media.

    The first is how the ABC’s senior management abandoned due process in the face of a sustained lobbying effort by a pro-Israel group to have Lattouf taken off air, under the confected basis she was “antisemitic”.

    Managing director David Anderson admitted in court that there was a “step missing” in the process that led to her sacking — in particular, a failure to consult with the ABC’s HR area, and a failure to discuss the attacks on Lattouf with Lattouf herself, before kicking her out.

    To this, it might be added, was acting editorial director Simon Melkman’s advice to management that Lattouf had not breached any editorial policies.

    Anderson bizarrely singled out Lattouf’s authorship, alongside Cameron Wilson, of a Crikey article questioning the narrative that pro-Palestinian protesters had chanted “gas the Jews”, as basis for his concerns about her, only for one of his executives to point out the article was “balanced and journalistically sound“.

    That is, by the ABC’s own admission, there was no basis to sack Lattouf and the sacking was conducted improperly. And yet, here we are, with the ABC tying itself in absurd knots — no such race as Lebanese, indeed — spending millions defending its inappropriate actions in response to a lobbying campaign.

    The second moment that stands out is a decision by the court early in the trial to protect the identities of those calling for Lattouf’s sacking.

    Abandoned due process
    The campaign that the group rolled out prompted the ABC chair and managing director to immediately react — and the ABC to abandon due process and procedural fairness. Yet the court protects their identities.

    The reasoning — that the identities behind the complaints should be protected for their safety — may or may not be based on reasonable fears, but it’s the second time that institutions have worked to protect people who planned to undermine the careers of people — specifically, women — who have dared to criticise Israel.

    The first was when some members — a minority — of a WhatsApp group supposedly composed of pro-Israel “creatives” discussed how to wreck the careers of, inter alia, Clementine Ford and Lauren Dubois for their criticism of Israel.

    The publishing of the identities of this group was held by both the media and the political class to be an outrageous, antisemitic act of “doxxing”, and the federal government rushed through laws to make such publications illegal.

    No mention of making the act of trying to destroy people’s careers because they hold different political views — or, cancel culture, as the right likes to call it — illegal.

    Whether it’s courts, politicians or the media, it seems that the dice are always loaded in favour of those wanting to crush criticism of Israel, while its victims are left to fend for themselves.

    Human rights lawyer and fighter against antisemitism Sarah Schwartz has been repeatedly threatened with (entirely vexatious) lawsuits by Israel supporters for her criticism of Israel, and her discussion of the exploitation of Australian Jews by Peter Dutton.

    Targeted by another News Corp smear campaign
    She’s been targeted by yet another News Corp smear campaign, based on nothing more than a wilfully misinterpreted slide. She has no government or court rushing to protect her.

    Meanwhile, Peter Lalor, one of Australia’s finest sports journalists (and I write as someone who can’t abide most sports journalism) lost his job with SEN because he, too, dared to criticise Israel and call out the Palestinian genocide. No-one’s rushing to his aide, either.

    No powerful institutions are weighing in to safeguard his privacy, or protect him from the consequences of his opinions.

    The individual cases add up to a pattern: Australian institutions, and especially its major media institutions, will punish you for criticising Israel.

    Pro-Israel groups will demand you be sacked, they will call for your career to be destroyed. Those groups will be protected.

    Media companies will ride roughshod over basic rights and due process to comply with their demands. You will be smeared and publicly vilified on completely spurious bases. Politicians will join in, as Jason Clare did with the campaign against Schwartz and as Chris Minns is doing in NSW, imposing hate speech laws that even Christian groups think are a bad idea.

    Damaging the fabric of democracy
    This is how the campaign to legitimise the Palestinian genocide and destroy critics of the Netanyahu government has damaged the fabric of Australia’s democracy and the rule of law.

    The basic rights and protections that Australians should have under a legal system devoted to preventing discrimination can be stripped away in a moment, while those engaged in destroying people’s careers and livelihoods are protected.

    Ill-advised laws are rushed in to stifle freedom of speech. Australian Jews are stereotyped as a politically convenient monolith aligned with the Israeli government.

    The experience of Palestinians themselves, and of Arab communities in Australia, is minimised and erased. And the media are the worst perpetrators of all.

    Bernard Keane is Crikey’s politics editor. Before that he was Crikey’s Canberra press gallery correspondent, covering politics, national security and economics. First published by Crikey.

    This post was originally published on Asia Pacific Report.

  • Powerless – another Asia-Pacific angle on the long siege of USAID

    COMMENTARY: By Robin Davies

    Much has been and much more will be written about the looming abolition of USAID.

    It’s “the removal of a huge and important tool of American global statecraft” (Konyndyk), or the wood-chipping of a “viper’s nest of radical-left marxists who hate America” (Musk) or, more reasonably, the unwarranted cancellation of an organisation that should have been reviewed and reformed.

    Commentators will have a lot to say, some of it exaggerated, about the varieties of harm caused by this decision, and about its legality.

    Some will welcome it from a conservative perspective, believing that USAID was either not aligned with or acting against the interests of the United States, or was proselytising wokeness, or was a criminal organisation.

    Some, often more quietly, will welcome it from an anti-imperialist or “Southern” perspective, believing that the agency was at worst a blunt instrument of US hegemony or at least a bastion of Western saviourism.

    I want to come at this topic from a different angle, by providing a brief personal perspective on USAID as an organisation, based on several decades of occasional interaction with it during my time as an Australian aid official.

    Essentially, I view USAID as a harried, hamstrung and traumatised organisation, not as a rogue agency or finely-tuned vehicle of US statecraft.

    Peer country representative
    My own experience with USAID began when I participated as a peer country representative in an OECD Development Assistance Committee (DAC) peer review of the US’s foreign assistance programme in the early 1990s, which included visits to US assistance programmes in Bangladesh and the Philippines, as well as to USAID headquarters in Washington DC.

    I later dealt with the agency in many other roles, including during postings to the OECD and Indonesia and through my work on global and regional climate change and health programmes, up to and including the pandemic years.

    An image is firmly lodged in my mind from that DAC peer review visit to Washington. We had had days of back-to-back meetings in USAID headquarters with a series of exhausted-looking, distracted and sometimes grumpy executives who didn’t have much reason to care what the OECD thought about the US aid effort.

    It was a muggy summer day. At one point a particularly grumpy meeting chair, who now rather reminds of me of Gary Oldman’s character in Slow Horses, mopped the sweat from his forehead with his necktie without appearing to be aware of what he was doing. Since then, that man has been my mental model of a USAID official.

    But why so exhausted, distracted and grumpy?

    Precisely because USAID is about the least freewheeling workplace one could construct. Certainly it is administratively independent, in the sense that it was created by an act of Congress, but it also receives its budget from the President and Congress — and that budget comes with so many strings attached, in the form of country- or issue-related “earmarks” or other directives that it might be logically impossible to allocate the funds as instructed.

    Some of these earmarks are broad and unsurprising (for example, specific allocations for HIV/AIDS prevention and treatment under the Bush-era PEPFAR program) while others represent niche interests (Senator John McCain once ridiculed earmarks pertaining to “peanuts, orangutans, gorillas, neotropical raptors, tropical fish and exotic plants”) — but none originates within USAID.

    Informal earmarks calculation
    I recall seeing an informal calculation showing that one could only satisfy all the percentage-based earmarks by giving most of the dollars several quite different jobs to do. A 2002 DAC peer review noted with disapproval some 270 earmarks or other directive provisions in aid legislation; by the time of the most recent peer review in 2022, this number was more like 700.

    Related in part to this congressional micro-management of its budget — along with the usual distrust of organisations that “send” money overseas — USAID labours under particularly gruelling accountability and reporting requirements.

    Andew Natsios — a former USAID Administrator and lifelong Republican who has recently come to USAID’s defence (albeit with arguments that not everybody would deem helpful) — wrote about this in 2010. In terms reminiscent of current events, he described the reign of terror of Lieutenant-General Herbert Beckington, a former Marine Corps officer who led USAID‘s Office of the Inspector General (OIG) from 1977 to 1994.

    He was a powerful iconic figure in Washington, and his influence over the structure of the foreign aid programME remains with USAID today. … Known as “The General” at USAID, Beckington was both feared and despised by career officers. Once referred to by USAID employees as “the agency’s J. Edgar Hoover — suspicious, vindictive, eager to think the worst” …

    At one point, he told the Washington Post that USAID’s white-collar crime rate was “higher than that of downtown Detroit.” … In a seminal moment in this clash between OIG and USAID, photographs were published of two senior officers who had been accused of some transgression being taken away in handcuffs by the IG investigators for prosecution, a scene that sent a broad chill through the career staff and, more than any other single event, forced a redirection of aid practice toward compliance.

    Labyrinthine accountability systems
    On top of the burdens of logically impossible programming and labyrinthine accountability systems is the burden of projecting American generosity. As far as humanly possible, and perhaps a little further, ways must be found of ensuring that American aid is sourced from American institutions, farms or factories and, if it is in the form of commodities, that it is transported on American vessels.

    Failing that, there must be American flags. I remember a USAID officer stationed in Banda Aceh after the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami spending a non-trivial amount of his time seeking to attach sizeable flags to the front of trucks transporting US (but also non-US) emergency supplies around the province of Aceh.

    President Trump’s adviser Stephen Miller has somehow determined to his own satisfaction that the great majority (in fact 98 percent) of USAID personnel are donors to the Democratic Party. Whether or not that is true, let alone relevant, Democrat administrations have arguably been no kinder to USAID than Republican ones over the years.

    Natsios, in the piece cited above, notes that The General was installed under Carter, who ran on anti-Washington ticket, and that there were savage cuts — over 400 positions — to USAID senior career service staffing under Clinton. USAID gets battered no matter which way the wind blows.

    Which brings me back to necktie guy. It has always seemed to me that the platonic form of a USAID officer, while perhaps more likely than not to vote Democrat, is a tired and dispirited person, weary of politicians of all stripes, bowed under his or her burdens, bound to a desk and straitjacketed by accountability requirements, regularly buffeted by new priorities and abrupt restructures, and put upon by the ignorant and suspicious.

    Radical-left Marxists and vipers probably wouldn’t tolerate such an existence for long. Who would? I guess it’s either thieves and money-launderers or battle-scarred professionals intent on doing a decent job against tall odds.

    Robin Davies is an honorary professor at the Australian National University’s (ANU) Crawford School of Public Policy and managing editor of the Devpolicy Blog. He previously held senior positions at Australia’s Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade (DFAT) and AusAID.

    This post was originally published on Asia Pacific Report.

  • Northrop Grumman readies third Australian Triton UAV

    Northrop Grumman announced on 6 February that it has successfully completed testing of the third MQ-4C Triton high-altitude long endurance unmanned aerial vehicle (HALE UAV) ordered by the Royal Australian Air Force (RAAF) at its Palmdale facility. The company noted that it is preparing to ferry the aircraft to the US Navy in Patuxent River, […]

    The post Northrop Grumman readies third Australian Triton UAV appeared first on Asian Military Review.

    This post was originally published on Asian Military Review.

  • Trump’s ‘Riviera’ plan for Gaza heralds an age of naked fascism

    COMMENTARY: By Sawsan Madina

    I watched US President Donald Trump’s joint press conference with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu last week in utter disbelief. Not that the idea, or indeed the practice, of ethnic cleansing of Palestine is new.

    But at that press conference the mask has fallen. Recently, fascism has been on the march everywhere, but that press conference seemed to herald an age of naked fascism.

    So the Palestinians have just been “unlucky” for decades.

    “Their lives have been made hell.” Thank God for grammar’s indirect speech. Their lives have been made hell. We do not know who made their lives hell. Nothing to see here.

    Trump says of Gaza: “We’ll own it and be responsible for dismantling all of the dangerous unexploded bombs and other weapons on the site, level the site, and get rid of the destroyed buildings — level it out and create an economic development that will supply unlimited numbers of jobs and housing for the people of the area . . . ”

    I wonder who are those lucky “people of the area” he has in mind, once those “unlucky” Palestinians have been “transferred” out of their homeland.

    Trump speaks of transforming Gaza into a magnificent “Riviera of the Middle East”. Obviously, the starved amputees of Gaza do not fit his image of the classy people he wants to see in the Riviera he wants to build, on stolen Palestinian land.

    No ethnic cleansing questions
    After the press conference, I did not hear a single question about ethnic cleansing, genocide, occupation or international law.

    Under the new fascist leaders, just like under the old ones, those words have become old-fashioned and are to be expunged from the lexicon.

    The difference has never been more striking between the meek who officially hold the title “journalist” and the brave who actually work to hold the powerful to account.

    Now, more than ever, independent journalists are a threatened species. We should treasure them, support them and protest every attempt to silence them.

    Gaza is now the prototype. We can forget international laws and international organisations. We have the bombs. You do as we wish or you will be obliterated.

    Who now dares say that the forced transfer of a population by an occupying power is a war crime under the Geneva Convention? But then again, Trump and Netanyahu are not really talking about “forced transfer”. They are talking about “voluntary transfer”.

    Once the remaining Israeli hostages have been freed, and water and food have been cut off again, those unlucky Palestinians will climb voluntarily onto the buses waiting to transport them to happiness and prosperity in Egypt and Jordan.

    Or to whatever other client state Trump manages to threaten or bribe.

    Can the International Criminal Court (ICC) command a shred of respect when Netanyahu is sharing the podium with Trump? Or indeed when Trump is at the podium?

    Dismantling the international order
    Recently, fascist leaders have been dismantling the international order by accusing its organisations and officials of being “antisemitic” or “working with terrorists”. Tomorrow they will defund and delegitimise these organisations without the need for an excuse.

    I listen to Trump speak of combatting antisemitism and deporting Hamas sympathisers and I hear, “We will combat anti-Israel views and we will deport those who protest Israel’s crimes.

    “And we will continue to conflate antisemitism and anti-Israel’s views in order to silence pro-Palestinian voices.”

    I watch Trump and Netanyahu, the former reading the thoughts of a real estate developer turned into a president’s speech and the latter grinning like a Cheshire cat — and I am gripped by fear. Not just for the Palestinians, but for all humanity.

    If we think fascism is only coming for people on a distant shore, we ought to think again.

    I watch Netanyahu repeating lies that investigative journalists have spent months debunking. Why would he care? The truth about his lies will not make it to mainstream media and the consciousness of the majority of people.

    Lies taking hold, enduring
    And the more he repeats those lies, the more they take hold and endure.

    I wonder how our political leaders will spin our allies’ new, illegal and immoral plans. For years, they have clung to the mantra of the two-state solution while Israel continued to make every effort to render this solution unfeasible.

    What will they say now? With what weasel words will they stay on the same page as our friends in the US and Israel?

    Netanyhu praises Trump for thinking outside the box. Here is an idea that Israel has spent billions on arms and propaganda to persuade people that it is dangerously outside the box.

    Instead of asking Egypt and Jordan to take the Palestinians, why not make Israel end the occupation and give Palestinians equal rights in their own homeland?

    Sawsan Madina is former head of Australia’s SBS Television. This article was first published by John Menadue’s public policy journal Pearls and Irritations and is republished with permission.

    This post was originally published on Asia Pacific Report.

  • Hasbara’s Foot Soldiers

    On 3 February there appeared in the local paper of record, the Sydney Morning Herald (Independent. Always), a number of letters regarding Israel and Gaza. The first opines:

    … the more often people hear lies and see troubling incidents like violence and vandalism associated with Jews, the more likely people are to blame Jews for causing those troubles, regardless of the truth.

    A sub-editor attached an AP-credited photograph of a devastated Gaza with the caption ‘Destruction caused by the Israeli air and ground offensive in Gaza’.

    Is this seeming carnage a fabricated Hamas photoshop of a functioning Gaza Strip, a propaganda vehicle to blame Jews for ‘troubling incidents like violence and vandalism’?

    No, the carnage is real, as attested by the next letter:

    … Israel says it bombed these buildings [homes, schools and hospitals] because Hamas was using them for military purposes. In my opinion, it’s Hamas’s human-shield tactics that were actually intolerable.

    Hamas operatives were actually behind every person and every building and edifice (including the bulging cemeteries) so that every square inch of Gaza had to be obliterated! The task continues.

    The third letter confirms:

    … these schools, hospitals and apartment buildings were used by Hamas to store weaponry and shield their combatants. The IDF claims it did all in its power to mitigate civilian harm but it appears Hamas was quite willing to sacrifice its people in pursuit of their goals.

    These statements are preposterous rubbish. But whence do they come?

    The Australian Jewish ‘faith’ school system contributes (‘The elephant in the Zionist classroom’, Pearls & Irritations) – where its indoctrination of a ‘love of Israel’ into vulnerable minds competes for supremacy with Jewish ethics, supposedly universal. University Departments of Jewish studies further the indoctrination.

    From long indifference to the Palestine-Israel issue, my interest and concern was aroused precisely by a spate of crazy op-eds and letters which insulted my intelligence. The propaganda served not to persuade but to repel me. The occasion was the mortal illness and death of Yasser Arafat in November 2004. I wrote an account of the local mainstream media hysteria at the time (‘Arafat in Australian Media’, ZNet).

    The crazy letters are standard fare in the mainstream media – the authors evidently have no trouble getting them printed in tightly controlled letters pages. I have no such luck.

    The themes? God promised Israel to the Jews. We were there first and have remained there since. The UN partitioned Palestine in 1947 – the Zionists accepted it but the Arabs rejected it when the Palestinians could have had their own state. The land is ours because we conquered it in war. Palestinians deny Israel’s right to exist. Israel has made myriad peace offers but the offers have been refused. Give them an inch and they want a mile. The Palestinians know only terrorism. Palestinian schoolbooks socialize children into hating Jews. The Palestinians prefer perpetual victimhood. Etc.

    Some Orthodox Jews erect eruvs so that they can nip down to the shop during the Sabbath, conveniently in defiance of Jewish law. The letter writers erect a mental ghetto which keeps them inside and immune to the realities of the state of Israel, conveniently in defiance of facts and logic.

    Peter Beinart, in his new book Being Jewish After the Destruction of Gaza (as recounted by Abba Solomon) claims that Jewish devotion to Israel is one of idolatry. The term is suggestive but doesn’t seem to capture the essence. There is a mass hypnotism at work, reflected in the youngsters seduced to go and train and fight in the IDF – a dangerous delusion.

    Why haven’t all these letter-writing zealots made Aliyah? Some others have but the bulk prefer to remain rooted in their native soil. The great Russian Jewish exodus had many of them preferring to go to countries other than Israel, including Australia. The Australian Jewish population is now expanded by Jewish Israeli emigrés seeking a better life.

    It is telling that Melburnian Nomi Kaltmann could write an article titled ‘Why I’ll take Melbourne over New York as a place to raise a Jewish family’ (July 2024). Israel doesn’t rate a mention.

    Film culture critic Ed Rampell reviewed the now year-old documentary Israelism and interviewed its directors. Rampell notes:

    Israelism is about unconditional – in some sense it elides or depoliticizes the actual politics of Israel-Palestine, and it turns Israel into a sort of Jewish Disneyland, a place where all of Jewish people’s wildest dreams can come true.

    A sort of Jewish Disneyland is it. Israel as not the promised land but the great holiday camp in the sky? In spite of the stark reality.

    Cults are organizations devoted to the harm of their members. The cult of Zionism is devoted to the harm of others – the ethnic cleansing of Palestine now turned to genocide. The built-in and ongoing barbarism doesn’t seem to have dislodged the letter-writing foot soldiers from their ghetto and from their unquestioned commitment to this cause become pathological.

    This rank and file is given succor by the ‘official’ Australian Jewish organizations, all unrepentantly Zionist. Among which is the Zionist Federation of Australia, currently headed by one Jeremy Leibler. Leibler is part of Australian Zionist royalty, descended from brothers Isi (Uncle) and Mark (father). Mark Leibler, in particular, has long been indulged and influential amongst the political class and in the media.

    Here we have Leibler Jr (‘Labor has failed the Jewish community …’, SMH, 4 February; paywall) defending tooth and nail a make-believe Israel. (Leibler has an impeccable academic record and is a top corporate lawyer – he can’t be that blind.)

    The Australian Labor Party, having long been obeisant to the Zionist imperative, has recently cooled its ardor in the face of the Palestinian holocaust, if only marginally. Leibler demands absolute fealty and the comprehensive quashing of pro-Palestinian protest and support.

    Leibler rants:

    Until Australia’s foreign policy returns to a rational, principled footing (sic) – where the government can unequivocally rebuke these ways in which Israel is being demonised (sic), and Jews who support its right to exist are slurred as racists or genocide supporters – the Jewish community (sic) will not feel that the government is taking the threat of antisemitism seriously. If a government is willing to sacrifice decades of bipartisan support for a fellow liberal democracy (sic) to satisfy certain electorates (sic) …

    Ludicrous and grotesque. Meanwhile Australian anti-Zionist Jews, not to mention tens of thousands of dead and wounded Palestinians, have been whited out of the picture.

    The post Hasbara’s Foot Soldiers first appeared on Dissident Voice.


    This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Evan Jones.

    This post was originally published on Radio Free.

  • ‘Journalism has become a blood sport. It is harder and harder to tell the truth’

    A investigative journalism programme — Organised Crime and Corruption Reporting Project (OCCRP) — that has pubiished exposes about the South Pacific and has not been impacted on by the “freeze” of USAID funding has hit back in an editorial calling for support of independent media.

    EDITORIAL: By the OCCRP editors

    “OCCRP is a deep state operation.
    “OCCRP is connected to the CIA.
    “OCCRP was tasked by USAID to overthrow President Donald Trump.”

    How did we end up getting this kind of attention? Old fashioned investigative journalism.

    We wrote a simple story in 2019 about how Rudy Giuliani went to Ukraine for some opposition research and ended up working with people connected to organised crime who misled him.

    Unbeknown to us, a whistleblower found the story online and added it to a complaint that was the basis of President Trump’s first impeachment. We also wrote a story about Hunter Biden‘s business partners and their ties to organised crime but that hasn’t received the same attention.

    Journalism has become a blood sport. It’s harder and harder to tell the truth without someone’s interests getting stepped on.

    OCCRP prides itself on being independent and nonpartisan. No donor has any say in our reporting, but we often find ourselves under attack for our funding.

    It’s not just political interests but organised crime, businesses, enablers, and other journalists who regularly attack us. What’s common in all of these attacks is that the truth doesn’t matter and it will not protect you.

    Few attack the facts in our reporting. Instead we’re left perplexed by how to respond to wild conspiracy theories, outright disinformation, and hyperbolic hatred.

    At the same time, we’ve lost 29 percent of our funding because of the US foreign aid freeze. This includes 82 percent of the money we give to newsrooms in our network, many of which operate in places [Pacific Media Watch: Such as in the Pacific] where no one else will support them.

    This money did not only fund groundbreaking, prize-winning collaborative journalism but it also trained young investigative reporters to expose wrongdoing. It’s money that kept journalists safe from physical and digital attacks and supported those in exile who continued to report on crooks and dictators back in their home countries.

    OCCRP now has 43 less journalists and staff to do our work.

    No attack or funding freeze will stop us from trying to fulfill our mission. Just in the past week, OCCRP and its partners revealed how Russia’s shadow fleet sources its ships, how taxes haven’t been paid on Roman Abramovich’s yachts, and how Syrian intelligence spied on journalists.

    Next week, we’ll take on another set of powerful actors to defend the public interest. And another set the week after that.

    We are determined to stay in the fight and keep reporting on organised crime and the corrupt who enable and benefit from it. But it’s getting harder and we need help.

    This post was originally published on Asia Pacific Report.

  • Australia acquires more long-range anti-radiation missiles

    Australia is acquiring more Northrop Grumman AGM-88G Advanced Anti-Radiation Guided Missile-Extended Range (AARGM-ER) missiles worth up to A$$650 million via the US Foreign Military Sales (FMS) mechanism, the Australian Department of Defence (DoD) announced on 30 January. “This is to increase the warstock of the Australian Defence Force and its ability to deter Australia’s potential […]

    The post Australia acquires more long-range anti-radiation missiles appeared first on Asian Military Review.

    This post was originally published on Asian Military Review.

  • ‘Invasion Day’ Protests Draw Tens Of Thousands Across Australia

    Tens of thousands of people took part in “Invasion Day” protests in cities and towns across Australia on Sunday, January 26. The protests highlighted the ongoing oppression of Indigenous peoples under colonial occupation, and opposed the celebration of ‘Australia Day,’ which falls on January 26—the anniversary of the British invasion of the lands now known as Australia, in 1788.
    Ruby Wharton, Community Development Officer at Sisters Inside Inc., spoke at the Invasion Day protest in Meanjin (Brisbane). Protesters met at Victoria Park before marching through the city to Musgrave Park, the site of the Brisbane Sovereign Embassy, established in 2012 as a symbol of Aboriginal sovereignty.

    The post ‘Invasion Day’ Protests Draw Tens Of Thousands Across Australia appeared first on PopularResistance.Org.

    This post was originally published on PopularResistance.Org.