If the national result for the Coalition was a bloodbath, the electorate of Ryan was the crime scene. Stuart McCarthy on the veterans vote and how the Liberals imploded in the Federal Election. Part 1.

The numbers, as they say, never lie. Last Saturday’s numbers were swift, and they were brutal. Just over two hours after the east coast polling booths closed, Prime Minister Anthony Albanese’s Labor government became the first federal government in history to be returned with an increased majority after its first term in office.

Within three hours, the numbers showed an equally historical bloodbath for the Opposition, the worst federal election result in the Coalition’s history.

Among the big casualties was Opposition Leader Peter Dutton in the south-east Queensland seat of Dickson. With a handful of seats still undecided, Labor has at least 91 seats in the lower house, while the Coalition has hung onto as few as 40. Greens leader Adam Bandt was one of his party’s three casualties in the lower house. 

Only one Greens MP – Elizabeth Watson-Brown – might return to Canberra, after an agonising preference count set to continue well into next week.

 

The results for the independents and other minor parties in the lower house were mixed, just as they were in the Senate.

Independent ‘Teals’ MP Zoe Daniel conceded the Victorian seat of Goldstein back to Liberal’s Tim Wilson, while former Nationals MP Andrew Gee, now an independent, brought the regional NSW seat of Calare into the cross bench. The number of independent lower house seats now stands at ten, with independents narrowly ahead in the tally for two of the nine remaining undecided seats.

The Senate will likely see a Labor majority of two seats over the Coalition, with 11 seats in the hands of the Greens. Six independent and other minor party Senators look set to round out the cross bench.

In the LNP stronghold of Queensland, the party lost five seats to Labor, with Labor also winning at least two of the three south-east Queensland seats won by The Greens in the 2022 ‘greenslide’. The past two elections have seen a three-way in south-east Queensland’s south-east corner between Labor, the LNP and The Greens, but Labor now seems to have the upper hand.

Ryan a knife-edge seat

Watson-Brown, hanging on as the sole survivor of the 2022 greenslide, is the Member for Ryan in Brisbane’s western suburbs. For a forensic look at the LNP’s woeful performance in its final years in office under Scott Morrison, then in the Dutton Opposition in the lead up to last weekend’s election, this knife-edge seat along the northern banks of the Brisbane River is a good place to start.

If the national result for the Coalition was a bloodbath, this electorate was the crime scene. The punchline – without giving too much away on this story yet – is that the prime suspect just landed a Queensland taxpayer-funded gig with his hands now on the checkbook for much of the key infrastructure soon to be built for the 2032 Olympic Games.

Ryan stretches from Brisbane’s inner western suburbs around the University of Queensland, through the ‘aspirational’ mortgage belt, to an affluent semi-rural area on the city’s outer western fringe. Of relevance to the fortunes of a party that postures on its “national security” credentials, the seat also encompasses Gallipoli Barracks – one of the largest defence force bases in the country – in the inner-northern suburb of Enoggera.

Data from the most recent census and the Department of Veterans Affairs (DVA) suggests current and former defence force members, their families, defence civilians and others with a direct interest in relevant policies comprise as many as one fifth of Ryan’s voters.

The veterans’ vote

The “veterans’ vote” is diffuse across most of Australia, hence is poorly understood by mainstream political commentators, but Ryan and the neighbouring seat of Blair are two electorates where uniformed personnel and veterans vote in big numbers.

Prior to the 2022 election, Ryan was a “blue ribbon” LNP seat, taken only briefly by Labor after a 2001 by-election on the retirement of Howard-era cabinet minister John Moore, who held the seat for 25 years. Courier-Mail columnist Des Houghton wrote in the lead up to this year’s election that Ryan was a must-win seat if the LNP was to have any chance of returning to government.

The challenge here was substantial. The LNP didn’t respond to our repeated requests for comment this week, but a Queensland Labor campaign official told MWM that prior to the election, he assessed Ryan would need to see a primary LNP vote “in the 40s” for the party to have any chance of success across south-east Queensland.

 

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The tally in Ryan this week has boiled down to a three-way contest between Watson-Brown, LNP candidate Maggie Forrest and Labor’s Rebecca Hack, and the result remains in doubt. With 85.8% of the votes counted by Friday afternoon, Forrest has conceded defeat with 36.2% of the primary vote in a -3.3% swing adding to her party’s -10.1% walloping in 2022.

This year’s winner will be decided on preferences, in a close contest between Watson-Brown and Labor’s Rebecca Hack for second place in the primary count. As postal votes trickle in and a gap of around 500 votes slowly narrowing in Hack’s favour, party officials say the final result may not be known until late next week. Hack told MWM on Wednesday:

“Our grassroots campaign was up against millions of dollars pouring into Ryan from the LNP and Greens. The count is very close, and it may take some time to know the final outcome, but voters in Ryan have shown that they vote with their values.”

The “values” question was a key one in this electorate. Hack, Watson-Brown and Forrest are all high-quality candidates. Educated, family-oriented career-women, all three have credentials and backgrounds with solid appeal to voters from their respective parties’ core constituencies. What this election revealed in stark numbers was just how well – or poorly – each party performed on substance during the last parliamentary term and during the election campaign.

A perceived broadening of The Greens’ policy platform from an environmental conservation party historically appealing to older voters, to a left-wing party appealing to younger voters on social justice issues is certainly a factor in this election.

The perception arose in part from the involvement of Greens’ MP Max Chandler-Mather – who represents the Griffith electorate across the river – in a controversial trade union rally last year.

Watson-Brown has been described elsewhere as a “Green Teal,” comparing her to independents in the southern capitals who won office in 2022 on a platform of climate change mitigation and improved government transparency, coupled with classical liberal rather than left wing economic policies.

Queensland Greens officials who spoke to MWM dispute that characterisation, pointing to Watson-Brown’s involvement in social justice causes such as opposing privatisation of public infrastructure decades before she entered politics, and her recent parliamentary speeches on corporate tax snd related social justice issues.

Much ink has been spilled this week on the LNP’s identity crisis as a centre-right or hard-right party, but their posturing  as the party of responsible economic management and national security has always been core to that identity. In what was billed as the “cost of living” election however, the LNP offered little of practical importance to swing the votes of ordinary people, against a Labor government standing on its record and offering modest income tax breaks against the backdrop of a deteriorating global economy.

The LNP’s tax-breaks-for-business-lunches blunder, announced in Ryan, highlights an absence of clear strategic thought in the party’s leadership.  On Defence, Labor and the LNP are in lockstep on the big-ticket items including AUKUS. The LNP’s effort to distinguish itself from Labor during the election amounted to a promise to outspend them on capability platforms to “keep Australians safe,” without identifying what those platforms might be. Not a word was uttered on how the LNP planned to fix the ongoing crisis in recruiting and retaining the defence force personnel needed to operate those hypothetical capability platforms. 

What transpired instead from the LNP was another misdirected ideological crusade. Assisted by Houghton and his NewsCorp colleagues’ obsession with The Greens, in Ryan and elsewhere it’s clear the LNP has taken its core constituency for granted, alienating conservative voters to such an extent many now regard the LNP as “the party that stands for nothing.”

Nicole De Lapp – the Ryan candidate for Gerrard Rennick’s recently formed People First party – is another Greens critic who spoke to MWM this week about the election results.

She says her main motivation for entering politics was a desire to encourage free speech, in an environment where she  the dominance of left-wing ideology for a reluctance by classical liberals to speak freely on important public policy issues. De Lapp, who told MWM Defence recruiting delays are a serious problem affecting Ryan’s constituents, says of the two major parties and their performance in the election:

“LNP conservatism needs to be re-branded, to move more in line with classical liberalism. Labor stayed true to their brand.”

Having joined People First as a first-time candidate as late as January, De Lapp achieved a credible fourth place in the Ryan results with 2.3% of the primary vote. Her People First colleague Kathryn Chadwick, who also lives in Ryan but was born and raised in the neighbouring seat of Blair, told MWM “I gave up on the LNP ages ago.”

Chadwick is a former registered nurse who served briefly in the defence force before studying to become a lawyer. During the recent Defence and Veteran Suicide Royal Commission (DVSRC), she supported hundreds of veterans and family members who provided crucial testimony to the inquiry, through her work with the Defence and Veterans’ Legal Service (DVLS). In a long interview for a forthcoming MWM piece, Chadwick showed a better grasp of substantial policy issues affecting this constituency than any other south-east Queensland federal MP or candidate this author has ever interviewed.

She picked up 3.8% of the primary vote against longstanding Labor MP and former shadow Veterans’ Affairs Minister Shayne Neumann, in an electorate that includes Amberley air force base and an even higher proportion of ex-military constituents than Ryan. 

Youtube, story of John Armfield’s RC testimony (client of Kathryn Chadwick) 

But it would be a mistake to think – as many conservative commentators still do – that the sole cause of the LNP’s demise is the conservative vote bleeding to right-wing minor parties, as credible as People First’s efforts may have been in this election.

The numbers demonstrate otherwise. Labor achieved a +5.9% swing in the primary vote, while The Greens saw a swing of only -1.5%. Although preference flows are difficult to ascertain, what’s clear is that much of the primary LNP vote in fact swung to Labor.

In the minds of many local conservative voters disillusioned with the LNP, their disillusionment has at least as much to do with the party’s incompetence as it has to do with a shift to the left.

This swing to Labor, the LNP’s obsessive ideological attacks on The Greens, and a policy platform devoid of substance, show the LNP’s real blunder in this campaign was to fixate on the wrong target and obliterate the electoral prospects of their dream candidate, in an inevitable backlash against US-style ‘astroturfed’ third-party political attack ads funded by industry.

In part 2, we will turn to the “veterans vote” and the backstory of  previous LNP Member for Ryan Julian SimJulis, plus his toxic influence on the poor results for the LNP atvthe polls last weekend.

This post was originally published on Michael West.

The location of Australia’s nuclear submarine bases on the East Coast is so sensitive that the Defence Department withheld an FOI response until 24 hours after the polls closed. Rex Patrick reports.

Documents released to me last Sunday, based on an FOI request, were due on March 15, just before the election campaign was about to start in earnest. Was the delay coincidental? I think not.

In March 2022, then Prime Minister Scott Morrison announced that a future submarine base would be built on the east coast of Australia to complement the base at HMAS Stirling in WA. The planned base would be used to home port some of the Royal Australian Navy’s (RAN) nuclear powered submarines, and support US and UK nuclear powered submarine visits.

Three cities were nominated as potential locations for the new submarine base, Brisbane, Newcastle and Port Kembla. These cities were selected from a Defence review of 19 potential sites, because of their access to areas the submarine would exercise in, their proximity to industrial infrastructure, and significant population centres (to support personnel and recruitment).

What was released to me on at 8:17 PM on Sunday (an odd time for an FOI official to be beavering away at his or her desk), were documents showing that the site feasibility was to be informed by the ongoing work of the then Nuclear Submarine Task Force (now Australian Submarine Agency), supported by the US and UK. Defence’s Security and Estate Group opened initial consultations with the New South Wales and Queensland Governments.

The feasibility studies were to include an assessment of the three locations against the International Atomic Energy Agency siting criteria from a nuclear safety and security perspective. The study was due for conclusion in the third quarter of 2023.

Defence disclosed eight documents in part and fully redacted 12 documents, one/some of which will be feasibility study/studies.

The redactions and exemptions were claimed on the grounds of national security (including the ‘mosaic theory’ that innocuous fragments of information can still reveal classified secrets), disclosure of trade secrets or commercially valuable information, and protection of proper and efficient” agency operations.

Defence is clearly intending to fight tooth and nail to prevent the disclosure of the politically sensitive site selection process.

Silence is golden

HMAS Ovens, an Oberon class submarine that served in the RAN from 1969 to 1995, has a formal ship’s motto, “Silence is golden”. It was an appropriate motto given the importance of stealth for submarines.

But it also seems to have been a motto adopted by the Albanese Government throughout the election campaign.

AUKUS is not popular amongst Labor voters.

After a short consult with Anthony Albanese, Richard Marles and Penny Wong, 24 hours prior to the announcement of an AUKUS study by Prime Minister Morrison, Labor committed to bi-partisan support for the program. Due process of consultation with the Labor Caucus and indeed the Labor membership on such an important issue was overridden by the desire to adopt a low target strategy for the 2022 election.

Following Labour’s 2022 election victory, there was an opportunity in March 2023 to walk away from AUKUS after the Morrison study was completed. The massive $368B price tag would have provided ample justification, but the Albanese government threw its full support behind the project at an AUKUS signing ceremony in San Diego.

Marles Mauled: Rex Patrick demolishes Defence sophistry on AUKUS, submarines, nuclear

Labor against war

In 2023, Marcus Strom, a former Albanese government press secretary, initiated a grassroots ‘Labor Against War’ organisation, which commenced its life with an opposition campaign to AUKUS.

Much criticism of AUKUS was expressed by Labor branches around the country, but the Labor leadership steamrolled the submarine agreement through the Labor National Conference with Albanese declaring “Nuclear powered submarines are what Australia needs in the future.”

Since then, however, a lineup of Labor luminaries, including Paul Keating, Gareth Evans, Bob Carr, Peter Garrett, Carmen Lawrence, Doug Cameron, and Melissa Parke, have continued to criticise the AUKUS submarine project, sharply questioning its geopolitical merit and expressing concern about the massive opportunity costs involved.

So, it’s unsurprising there was minimal AUKUS chat during the election campaign, and certainly no electioneering visits that centred around the program. The only mention of AUKUS came when Albanese rejected separate calls from Senator Jacqui Lambie and retired Australian Army Major General Michael Smith for an inquiry into AUKUS, as is occurring in the UK Parliament.

Lack of scrutiny

Sadly, there will be no AUKUS inquiry. Even though the Greens will share power with the Government in the Senate, the much-reduced Coalition will combine with the Government to strike down any attempt to initiate an inquiry.  The Greens are unlikely to make this a do-or-die condition on the passage of key government legislation.

The only oversight of AUKUS, including east coast basing, will be by individual Greens and cross-bench Senators in Senate Estimates and by people equipped to fight through the dysfunctional FOI system.

Work will continue in the background on site plans for an East Coast base, with little to no transparency around the process.

A site will need to be selected to install new wharves, maintenance facilities, logistics and training facilities, radiologically controlled workspaces, emergency preparedness and response facilities and appropriate physical security arrangements.

The Albanese Government decided to kick the can down the road during the 47th Parliament.  Having won the election, they’re now walking further down the road and the political can is waiting for them.  Some form of decision will need to made prior to the end to Albanese’s reign in the 48th Parliament.

Where will the base be?

All three short-listed east coast base sites are located in now Labour-held federal electorates.

The New South Wales and Queensland State Governments will likely engage in fierce competition to secure a multi-billion-dollar new base development for their state.

Even Port Kembla, where strong public opposition has been voiced in large protests, will remain in contention. With a significant Labor majority in the House, the electorate’s new Labor Left MP, former Greens member Carol Berry, will have little leverage. The best AUKUS opponents in Port Kembla can hope for is that the findings of a 2011 Defence basing study deter it as the optimal location.

Secret Navy business

Anthony Albanese’s indifference to FOI reform, in contrast to his strong promise in opposition, will hinder the public’s involvement in deciding where an East Coast base will finally be established. Legislation passed through the Parliament in 2024 allows the defence minister to unilaterally nominate a site by regulation. The Government’s preference will be to present a fait accompli to the residents of Brisbane, Newcastle or Port Kembla.

In the most recent FOI into basing the Department has engaged in temporal obstruction (the late release of an FOI) and a series of inappropriate redactions. One such redaction, just to give an example of the flimsy nature of the transparency exemptions being employed, relates to depth information in the approaches to the three ports. Whilst such information can be easily obtained from publicly available sea charts, for some reason it’s release under FOI has been suppressed.

MWM will keep on fighting for AUKUS transparency. A Federal Court appeal is currently on foot to access a report into where an AUKUS High Level Radioactive Waste site will be located. This newly released East Coast submarine base FOI will also be appealed (to the Information Commissioner) to gain access to the eight fully redacted documents.

It will be a battle, with the one shining light being,

there’s about as much chance of the RAN receiving US Virgina Class submarines by 2035 as there is that our FOI regime will be fixed.

The big problem is the non-refundable $4.7B that will be sent to the US over the next few years, to not get those US subs.

Government ignores AUKUS ‘very high risk’ warning from the Admiral in charge

 

 

This post was originally published on Michael West.

Expecting a “courageous” Anthony Albanese (as Sir Humphrey Appleby might say) following Labor’s spectacular re-election on Saturday? Andrew Gardiner reports the realities of politics dictate we rein in those expectations. 

Since 2023, some very telling (and, for the most part, uncontested) stories have circulated about one of the men pivotal to how the Albanese Government’s second term plays out. Labor numbers man, puller-of-strings and Special Minister of State Don Farrell – whose alleged “stitch up” of independents over donation and expenditure caps made headlines – emerges from neither smelling like a rose.  

The first involved pushing in and queue jumping to get a photo with footy legend Dermott Brereton before everyone else at the 2023 AFL Grand Final. “It was just the sense of entitlement … then to say ‘I’m a minister’,” a bewildered Brereton told 2GB. 

The second, more applicable anecdote concerns Farrell recounting another 2023 exchange, this time with Simon Holmes à Court, whose Climate 200 crowd-funds for independent candidates. On Holmes à Court’s charge the new donation and expenditure laws would entrench a tired two-party system, he exclaimed: “that’s the f..king point!”

For folks like Farrell, who hails from the centrist ‘Shoppies’ Union and last year was named top of a list of covert Canberra power players, ideology appears less important than power itself. His party, the ALP, broadly supports a raft of popular progressive policy outcomes, yet Farrell clearly sees “Teal” independents who share many of those same goals as the enemy. 

“Teals blackmailing us” won’t happen with a majority Labor government, he said on Sunday. 

If you think Farrell’s entitled, combative, power-driven style is a one-off in the Labor Cabinet, consider who picked him to be Minister for Trade and Tourism, plus Special Minister of State. That’s the same man who chose Resources Minister Madeleine (fossil fuels “will be needed for decades”) King, Communications Minister Michelle (media ownership inquiry “is not warranted”, no gambling ads reforms yet) Rowland, and Richard (AUKUS is “too big to fail”) Marles. 

The man who picked this uninspiring quartet was, of course, Prime Minister Anthony Albanese. 

Now more than ever after Saturday’s landslide victory, ‘Albo’ calls the shots. Lofty expectations for his second term should, perhaps, be tempered by past performance. 

Albo emboldened?

Post-election chatter among the commentariat was all about how a second Labor term (and a bigger majority in Parliament) would embolden the PM. “Australians have chosen to face global challenges the Australian way, looking after each other while building for the future”, said ‘Albo’ in his victory speech, sparking a glimmer of hope we might have a leader belatedly prepared to loosen the neo-imperial shackles on foreign policy, and even, perhaps, on some egregious Defence arrangements. 

News Corp outlets quote sources who describe the election result as “a strong endorsement of Labor’s agenda which includes bold promises like universal childcare and bulk billed GP visits for all Australians”. Others weren’t so gracious, the Daily Mail’s Peter van Onselen framing ‘boldness’ around a few exuberant lines at Labor’s victory celebration: “Saturday night wasn’t … an endorsement of (Labor’s) ill-fated foray into the culture wars via (a return to) the Voice” and welcome to country, he tut-tutted. 

While it remains to be seen whether the PM will deliver on them, Labor did go to the election with a raft of promises that were, yes, bold at times. On health, for example, he wants a 24-hour ‘1800MEDICARE’ service to allow patients access to free after-hours general practice tele health consultations, and 50 new urgent care clinics by June 2026, on top of the 87 already in existence. 

On Industrial relations, the PM vowed to protect penalty rates for workers, making them the law. Meanwhile, he pledged to shave 20 per cent off the student debt loans for around three million Australians in a matter of weeks from now. 

Fossil fuel rule

While that’s all very impressive, what of the areas where ‘Albo’ disappointed many Australians during his first term? Like the near blank cheque given to fossil fuel projects and exports which, in many cases, incur next to no royalties or taxes. 

In a hung parliament, the Greens pledged to crack down on such projects, and independent David Pocock wanted to tax gas exports. But to Farrell’s delight, the former scenario never came to pass. 

After fossil fuel interests gave Labor $668,425 over the past financial year, we can forget about any changes on that front.  

Then there’s the scourge of gambling ads, which ‘Albo’ infamously promised to reform the rules around. The late Dunkley MP Peta Murphy wanted a blanket ban on all gambling advertising, but following her death, Canberra watered it down to a cap of two gambling ads per hour on each channel before 10pm, with no ads an hour before and after live sport. 

Even that was shelved pre-election, after ‘Albo’ himself reportedly intervened. Labor gets a chaff bag of money from this industry; expect no ‘boldness’ on that front either. 

Another day, another gas approval as Labor caves on big dirty Barossa

AUKUS is legally impossible to get out (not to mention political suicide) so ‘Albo’ has a fair excuse to avoid sticking his neck out against that generational albatross. As for more public hearings at the NACC corruption watchdog, there’s a reason Labor and the L-NP originally stopped that, but it’s shrouded in secrecy. .

Who knows? Perhaps Labor’s worried it might be them one day. 

Media reform

Finally, we come to the holy grail of media reform. ‘Albo’, of all people, knows it’s utterly necessary to ensure his side gets a fair go but, more than that, to ensure something resembling a level playing field in the battle of ideas. 

But he knows that any past media mistreatment he simmers over would pale into insignificance next to the Jihad he’d face if he took on the likes of Murdoch and Stokes. He is unlikely to go there. 

You might have noticed a subtle shift in messaging from the top end of town during the election’s final week. To the “all Dutton all the time” catapulted into our zeitgeist, the usual suspects in corporate media added this wrinkle: “minority government would be a disaster”. 

“For the good of the country, one of (the major parties) must win majority government lest our futures be in the hands of the mad Greens, self-serving teals or the independent rabble,” the Adelaide Advertiser’s pre-election editorial read, it’s sentiments echoed from coast to coast. Apparently, curbing gambling addiction by ending those wacky Sportsbet ads, or taxing the multinationals ripping our resources out of the ground – policies pushed by Greens and “Teals” alike – is seen as nothing but “madness” by the powerful.  

The shift in messaging worked. While the L-NP was their preferred option, fossil fuel and gambling interests (among others) were petrified of a minority government scenario, in which “mad Greens and self-serving teals” could achieve what to them was the Armageddon of actual reform. 

Labor – with its Don Farrells*, Madeleine Kings and Anthony Albaneses – was a satisfactory second best. “Just try and avoid any ‘boldness’, right Albo? There’s a good fella”.

During Labor’s second term, it seems Australia has to settle for second best, too. 

*MWM reached out to Senator Farrell’s office for comment, but had not heard back by deadline. 

But for the women: Ali France, Peter Dutton, Ellie Smith in the big seat of Dickson

This post was originally published on Michael West.

An 11th-hour Election 2025 blitzkrieg claims the Greens are enabling extremists who “will do anything in their power to establish a worldwide Islamic Caliphate.” Wendy Bacon and Yaakov Aharon investigate the Dark Money election.

Minority Impact Coalition is a shadowy organisation which appeared on Australia’s political landscape in February of this year.

According to its constitution, its object is to promote “mutual respect and tolerance between groups of people in Australia by actively countering racism and bringing widespread understanding and tolerance amongst all sectors of the community.”

However, it is spreading ignorance, fear and Islamophobia to millions of mostly male Australians living in the outer suburbs and the regions.  

Advance is “transparent … easy to deal with”

Speaking to an Australian Jewish Association webinar, Roslyn Mendelle, who is of Israeli-American origin and a director of Minority Impact Coalition (MIC), said Advance introduced her to the concept of a third party.
“Advance has been nothing but absolutely honest, transparent, direct, and easy to deal with”, Mendelle said.

The electoral laws, which many say are “broken by design”, mean that it will be several months before MIC’s major donors are revealed. Donors making repeated donations below $15,900 are unlisted ‘dark money’. (This threshold will change to $5000 in 2026).

Coming in second place, are the returns from the Australian Taxation Office.

Further down is a $50,000 donation from Henroth Pty Ltd, co-owned by brothers Stanley and John Roth. Stanley is also a director of the $51 million charity United Israel Appeal, while John Roth is married to Australia’s Special Envoy for Combating Antisemitism Jillian Segal.

$14.5 million of Advance’s funds is unlisted dark money.

In NSW, it is targeting Greens candidates everywhere and is also focussed on the Labor-held seat of Gilmore, challenged by Liberal Party candidate Andrew Constance.

Roslyn (nee Wolberger) and her wife Hava Mendelle founded MIC last year. The couple met in 2017 while Roslyn was living in the Israeli settlement of Talpiot in Occupied East Jerusalem in breach of international law.

Independent journalist Alex McKinnon reported that MIC spokesperson and midwife, Sharon Stoliar, wrote in an open letter:

“When you chant ‘from the river to the sea Palestine will be free’… while wearing NSW Health uniforms, you are representing NSW Health in a call for genocide of Jews.YOU. ARE. SUPPORTING. TERRORISM… I. WILL. REPORT. YOU.”

Its campaign material is authorised by Joshu Turier, a retired boxer and right-wing extremist.

According to Facebook library, MIC’s ads are targeted at men, particularly between ages 35 and 54 in Queensland, Victoria and New South Wales.  

In mid-April, the group paid for an ad so extreme that Instagram pulled it, leading to Turier reposting on his own Facebook page again this week. He complained that “It’s beyond troubling when our media platforms remove simple, factual material.”

They are “coming for us” {Editor … oh no!} 

By Wednesday, the video was back on MIC’s Facebook account. The video says that the Greens are deliberately enabling pro-Palestine student protesters, who

“Don’t actually believe in the concept of a nation. They don’t believe in borders. They don’t believe there is a national identity. They believe in the Islamic brotherhood.”

“…It is just the beginning. When antisemitism starts, it’s not going to stop. They are going to come for Christians, for Atheists, for Agnostics.”

MIC is spending big on billboards, campaign trucks, and professional videos targeting at least five electorates. But despite their big spending, they cannot be found on the Australian Electoral Commission transparency register.

According to the transparency advocacy group WhoTargets.Me, MIC has spent more than $50,000 on Google and Meta ads in the last month alone. This doesn’t account for billboards, trucks, labour, or the 200,000 addresses letterboxed in late March.

More investigation shows their donations will all flow through the QJ Collective Ltd (QJC), which also ‘powers’ the Minority Impact Coalition website. QJC is registered as a significant third party with the Australian Electoral Commission.

Clones with ghost offices

MIC and Queensland Jewish Collective are virtually identical. They have always had the same directors – with Azin Naghibi replacing Roslyn’s partner, Hava Mendelle, as both QJC and MIC director in March 2025.

When QJC first came to MWM’s notice last year, it was running a relatively well-funded campaign – although limited to several seats – to ‘Put the Greens Last’ in the Queensland state election.

In September 2024, the group’s website stated that it was “non-partisan and not left or right-wing”, and that its “goal was to support Queenslanders in making informed decisions when voting for our leaders”. MIC is the vehicle for this campaign.

Today, neither the QJC nor MIC makes any such claim. The Collective’s website lists its leading ‘campaign’ as “exposing the two-faced nature of the Labor party”.

The alarming detail

While the two ‘grassroots’ groups share several of their total five different associated addresses, mostly consisting of shared offices, it is not a perfect match.

For both groups, directors Mendelle and Turier list their address as 470 St Pauls Terrace, Fortitude Valley, Queensland. There was no name or company, just an address, however, shared offices run by Jubilee Place are available at that location. 

QJC and MIC director Naghibi lists her address on both extracts as 740 St Pauls Terrace, a non-commercial building.

Either Mendelle and Turier are living out of a shared office, or Naghibi is unable to remember the address of the shared office she has little real connection to.

Last year, MWM contacted the owners of QJC’s listed office address at Insolvency Company Accountants in Tewantin, Queensland. At first, the firm said that no one had heard of them. Following that, the firm said that the Collective is a client of the firm, however denied any further connection.

A fresh search this year showed an additional contact address listed by the grassroots Collective – this time 1700 kilometres away – at 1250 Malvern Road, Malvern, Victoria. Again there was no name or company, just an address.

Located at that address is boutique accounting firm Greenberg & Co, which specialises in serving clients who are “high net worth individuals”. MWM contacted senior partner Jay Greenberg who said his role was only one of ‘financial compliance’. He said that he did have personal views on the election but these were not relevant. He declined to discuss further details.

Previously Greenberg served as Treasurer (2018-2019), under Jillian Segal as President, of the peak roof body the Executive Council of Australian Jewry.

Attack of the clones

Better Australia is a third party campaigner that, like QJ Collective in 2024, claims to be bipartisan.

Its communications are authorised by Sophie Calland, an active member of NSW Labor’s Alexandria Branch. Her husband Ofir Birenbaum – from the nearby Rosebery Branch – is also a member of the third party Better Australia.

Co-convenor of Labor Friends of Israel, Eric Roozendaal, and former Prime Minister Scott Morrison’s secretary, Yaron Finkelstein, provided further campaign advice at a members meeting.

Patron of Labor Friends of Israel and former Senator Nova Peris teamed up with Better Australia for a campaign video last week. 

“When Greens leader Adam Bandt refuses to stand in front of the Australian flag,” Peris said, “I ask, how can you possibly stand for our country?”

Better Australia’s stated goal is to campaign for a major government “regardless of which major party is in office”.

The group urges voters to “put the Greens and Teals last”, warning that a Labor minority government would be chaos. The ‘non-partisan’ third party has made no statements on the Liberal-National Coalition, nor on a minority government with One Nation.

Some Better Australia workers – who wear bright yellow jackets labelled ‘community advisor’ – are paid, and others volunteer.

‘Isabella’ told MWM that her enlistment as a volunteer for the third party campaigner is “not political” – rather it is all “about Israel”.

Previously Isabella had protested in support of the Israeli hostages and prisoners of war held in Gaza.

Better Australia’s ‘community advisor’ Isabella at a Bondi Junction polling booth. Source: Wendy Bacon, supplied

Another campaigner told us he was paid by Better Australia. He spoke little English and declined to say more.

Two schoolgirls campaigning at Rose Bay told MWM that they were paid by their father who had chaired a Better Australia meeting the previous evening. They declined to disclose his name.

On Wednesday, the group posted a video of Calland campaigning at Wentworth’s Kings Cross booth which included an image of her talking with  a young Better Australia worker.

MWM later interviewed this woman who is an Israeli on a working holiday visa. She was supporting the campaign because it fits her political “vision”: the Greens and independent MPs like Allegra Spender must be removed from office because they are “against Israel” and for a “Free Palestine” which would mean the end of “my country”.

Allegra Spender denies these assertions.

Greens leader Adam Bandt remained determinedly optimistic, telling MWM that organisations such as Better Australia and MIC,

“are able to run their disinformation campaigns because Australia has no truth in political advertising laws, which enables them to lie about the priorities of the Greens and crossbench without consequence, as well as huge corporate money flowing into politics.”

“In this term of Parliament, Labor failed to progress truth in political advertising laws, and instead did a dirty deal with the Liberals on electoral reforms to try and shut out third parties and independents.”

Labor’s candidate for Wentworth, Savannah Peake, told MWM on Tuesday that she has known Calland for 18 months.

Peake said that while she knew Calland had previously founded Better Council, she had only discovered Calland was authorising Better Australia when she arrived at the booth that morning.

Peake told MWM that she had contacted the NSW Labor Head Office to voice her objections and was confident the issue would be “dealt with swiftly”.

The third party campaign runs contrary to Peake’s preferences, which tells supporters in Wentworth to vote #1 Labor and #2 Allegra Spender. MWM repeatedly tried to follow up with Peake throughout the week to find out what action NSW Labor had taken but received no reply.

Liberal candidate for Wentworth, Ro Knox, complies with Better Australia’s call to put Greens last on her voting preferences. 

Many people in NSW Labor know about their fellow members’ involvement in Better Australia. The Minister for Environment and MP for Sydney Tanya Plibersek, state member Ron Hoenig and NSW Labor have all previously refused to answer questions.

A Labor volunteer at a Wentworth pre-poll booth told MWM that he disapproved if a fellow party member was involved with the third party. Two older Labor volunteers were in disbelief, having incorrectly assumed that the anti-Teal posters were authorised by the Trumpet of Patriots party. Another said he was aware of Calland’s activities but had decided ‘not to investigate’ further.

Better Australia focuses on Richmond

By the end of the week, Better Australia had left a trail of “Put the Greens last’ placards across Sydney’s Inner West, one of them outside the Cairo Takeaway cafe where the third party’s organiser Ofir Birenbaum was first exposed.

The third party have extended their polling campaign to the seat of Richmond, on the North coast of NSW where campaign sources are expecting more volunteers on election day.  

As parties dash to the finishing line, they are calling for more donations to counter the astroturfers. According to website TheyTargetYou, the major parties alone have spent $11.5 million on Meta and Google ads over the last month. 

Better Australia splurged $200,000 on ads targeting digital TV, social media, and the Australian Financial Review. Digital  ads will continue in the final three days of the election, exploiting loopholes in the mandated political advertising blackout. 

The Australian public has made little progress towards transparency in the current term of government.

Until reforms are made, Silicon Valley tech giants will continue to profit from dodgy ads and astroturfing groups sowing division with each Australian election cycle.

Dark Money: Labor and Liberal join forces in attacks on Teals and Greens

This post was originally published on Michael West.

Peter Dutton has gone from putting everything into the Coalition’s flailing election campaign, in a matter of weeks, to fighting for his political life as the Member for Dickson. Andrew Gardiner reports. 

Will Peter Dutton be the first ever Opposition Leader to lose his own seat? What a difference a month makes. In late February, Opposition Leader Peter Dutton was riding high in the polls, jetting around the country, prepping for a national campaign and largely ignoring his own seat of Dickson (during a cyclone, no less) to go visit wealthy donors in Sydney. 

“The money and effort they (the LNP) were putting into Dickson was very 2022,” one operative close to an opponent’s campaign told MWM. “The mail-outs were standard and the pamphlets were upbeat, with his smiling face all over them, if you can believe that”. 

Enter Climate 200-backed “Maroon independent” Ellie Smith, who announced her candidacy in late January. Just like that, Dutton found himself in a three-cornered contest with two women (his kryptonite, if the polls are a guide) in a three-cornered contest that has spooked the LNP camp. 

Then came the polls

Then came the polls, which seemed to show voters weren’t impressed with the Cyclone Alfred fiasco, the cross-country trips to see Gina Rinehart and the general sense of neglect by someone preoccupied with getting into The Lodge. Dutton leads on a two-candidate preferred basis (2CP) but that doesn’t factor in the real possibility he winds up in a 2CP battle with someone other than Labor’s Ali France. 

“With Greens and Legalise Cannabis preferences, Ellie Smith needs about 1,000 more votes to go above Labor (whose preferences will go her way) get into a two-way race with Dutton and – believe it or not – win,” one operative said. “This is doable.” 

Teal prefs threat

The Dutton campaign sees Smith as its major threat, focusing just about all its fire on the independent, a former Lock the Gate activist who they’re desperate to paint as a closet Green.

One throwaway quote about being a “greenie at heart”, and  a few hours handing out Green how-to-vote cards in 2022, have been catapulted into the conversation via eleventh hour messaging thought to have cost the Dutton campaign at least $250,000. 

In a matter of weeks, Dutton’s smiling countenance (below left) had disappeared from Dickson billboards/ pamphlets, attack ads have sprung up in their stead and, in an as-yet-unsolved mystery, blue t-shirt wearing strangers, their faces unknown to folks in Dickson, started turning up at local polling booths. 

IMAGE: Smith Campaign.

Shades of Josh in tight race

For those of us who covered Kooyong 2022, when upstart Monique Ryan stunned PM-in-waiting Josh Frydenberg, the echoes in Dickson are downright spooky. There was copious, almost giddy excitement in the (admittedly smaller-than-Kooyong) Smith camp, together with an influx of pamphlets, corflutes and doorknocking volunteers. 

There was also, just like Kooyong 2022, a simmering ill will among Dickson’s conservative, cohort, seen by the author on Wednesday at a pre-poll centre, from LNP voters and some volunteers alike. Their attitude can be best articulated as: “how dare you have a serious crack at our Pete”. 

Dickson, a combination of outer Brisbane mortgage belt, large parts of Moreton Bay and the beginnings of the bush, is fairly affluent but heavily populated by voters from Generation X (40-60) which keeps the seat perpetually close. 

Its demographics may put it in the ‘marginal’ column, but that hasn’t stopped Dutton from winning it at eight successive elections since unseating Cheryl Kernot in 2001. The confidence engendered by this impressive unbroken run may help explain his initially ho-hum approach to contest number nine. 

Of course, ho hum turned into ‘Banzai!’ in late March, but Dutton’s “Greenie at heart” narrative on Smith may have backfired. Intended to put a lid on the number of moderate LNP voters defecting to her, it had the unintended effect of energising Smith’s campaign.

Are the smears working any more?

“They’ve tossed $250,000 at Dickson in the form of negative ads, aimed largely at Ellie,” one Smith operative told MWM. “But it’s not working. We saw a big uptick in volunteers and raised $100,000 of our own off that.” 

Speaking to MWM, Smith said Dutton was “desperately trying to cling on in Dickson. Not because he wants to help people here, but to help his own political career”.  

From the author’s temporary digs at Kallangur in Dickson’s east, it appears Smith’s “Maroon Independent” campaign has more resources, numbers and enthusiasm than Dutton’s other opponents. It remains to be seen whether she can turn that into enough primary votes to have a real shot at winning. 

The author visited an early voting centre at Strathpine (in Dickson’s south east) on Wednesday afternoon. At first, all was quiet and polite between the various, equally-represented major camps of how-to-vote volunteers (see picture at left) but at around 3pm a group of young and boisterous group of LNP supporters (centre picture) literally surrounded the centre from both sides. 

Affectionately dubbed “the troops”, MWM was told they travel between early voting centres. The newcomers initially mistook this scribe for a voter.

Friendly ‘journalists’ only Mr Journalist

Offered an LNP how-to-vote card, I told them I’d already voted, only to be asked: “Did you vote Liberal?”. I told them I was a journalist covering the Dickson campaign, and asked whether they were local. The interview abruptly ended. “No comment, Mr Journalist”. 

So who are they? Theories from rival camps range from outsiders bused in from other seats to paid interstate operatives to members of the mysterious Plymouth Brethren, a secretive and sometimes extreme religious sect who made headlines on Monday for their over-the-top, pro-LNP campaigning  in other states.

A Brethren-linked sign like the one pictured below was spotted on a major road used by Dickson voters on Tuesday. What’s more, “some of the tactics ‘the troops’ employ at early voting centres – the blocking of other candidate’s volunteers, and talking over other candidates when they visit and interact with voters – seems reminiscent of what we read about the Brethren ,” one booth captain told MWM.

At first glance, the issues of greatest concern to Dickson constituents are boilerplate Australia. 72 hours out from polling day, Jane, a Strathpine shopper, was ever mindful of the cost-of-living, while interest rates and the environment were front-of-mind for Paul as he queued to vote early at Kallangur Scout Den. 

“It’s like our major parties are only interested in the now, and not the legacy they leave,” lamented Paul, as he picked up how-to-vote cards from volunteers for Smith and the Greens’ Vinnie Batten. 

But dig a little deeper and it quickly became clear that, among some voters at least, pride at having a high-achieving local MP had given way to disillusionment with Dutton the Opposition Leader. 

“We’re hearing a lot about neglect … stuff about traffic and transport … I think the local member is really focused on what’s happening in Canberra and the factions and fighting Labor”, Smith said. 

But the ‘neglect’ went further than that. Dutton snubbed a Dickson candidates’ forum, phoned in to debates on the ABC and commercial radio and, at the time of writing, had visited Dickson twice during the campaign. 

The latter stands in stark contrast with his preparedness to jet across the country last year, in the middle of a crucial by-election campaign, to spend an hour with Gina Rinehart on her 70th birthday. “The neglect really broke through into dinner table conversations when Dutton flew to Sydney for a fundraiser while we were left to fend for ourselves during Cyclone Alfred,” one operative told MWM. 

“If he loses Dickson, that moment was the turning point.”

This post was originally published on Michael West.

The AUKUS submarine project faces huge risks, and Cabinet knows. But as the Government ships $2B of taxpayers’ money to the US this year, with much more to follow, the taxpayer is not being told. Rex Patrick reports.

On 26 February this year, Vice Admiral Jonathan Mead, the man in charge of AUKUS, advised the Senate that the AUKUS submarine program was “very high risk”. He said, “We’ve made that clear to government, and the government has made that clear to the public.”

However, it has not.

I follow AUKUS closely and had not heard that publicly before. Whilst it is absolutely the case, and something MWM has reported on extensively, this was the first public admission of the very high risk nature of the project from the Australian Submarine Agency.

The Congressional Research Service says the US can’t build Virginia SSNs at a rate needed to transfer subs to us. The UK Infrastructure & Projects Authority says delivery of #AUKUS SSN reactors is unachievable. Even the RAN agrees AUKUS is high risk; yet they stumble on. #auspol pic.twitter.com/Uo4hPZ7WeI

— Rex Patrick (@MrRexPatrick) February 26, 2025

Concerns about US submarine production rates and the weakness of the UK’s submarine industrial base have generated grave doubts about whether the $368B AUKUS scheme will deliver nuclear-powered submarines for Australia.

Moreover, former Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull has revealed, after conversations with insiders, that there is no Plan B.

Plan B is that we will not get any submarines.

AUKUS risks unveiled – is Australia sleepwalking into a submarines disaster?

FOI ahoy

I was somewhat surprised by Admiral Mead’s unusual candour, so on 27 February, I moved to test the veracity of his remarks with an FOI application directed at the Australian Submarine Agency (ASA) seeking access to “any ministerial submission or briefing provided by ASA to the Minister for Defence … that refers to the AUKUS nuclear submarine program as involving ‘high risk’ or ‘very high risk’.”

I also sought access to ‘any statement made by the Minister for Defence or the Minister for Defence Industry and Capability Delivery that refers to the AUKUS nuclear submarine program as involving ‘high risk’ or ‘very high risk’.”

A decision on those was made this week. FOI applications can reveal the truth by what is disclosed, by what is withheld, and by confirming what doesn’t exist.

ASA confirmed the existence of a ministerial briefing characterising the AUKUS submarine program as involving ‘high risk’ or ‘very high risk’, but refused access to that briefing on national security and Cabinet secrecy grounds. Significantly, ASA’s refusal decision confirmed this document was produced for the dominant purpose of briefing a Minister on an attached Cabinet submission.

In effect, the Submarine Agency confirmed Admiral Mead’s statement that ASA has briefed the government on the ‘high risk’ or ‘very high risk’ nature of the AUKUS project, and that briefing was submitted to the Defence Minister for Cabinet consideration.

That high-risk assessment has gone to the very top of the Government.

Alarm bells should be ringing.

Misleading the public

But the FOI decision also reveals that Defence Minister Richard Marles has not been forthcoming with the Australian public about the full hazards of AUKUS.

In relation to statements the minister has made to the public on the risk status of the project, the Australian Submarine Agency advised that ‘no in scope documents were identified’ that show the Defence Minister has made any public statement that acknowledges the ‘high’ or ‘very high’ risk of the AUKUS scheme.

The agency was able to find only a handful of statements referring to risk management in general and assertions that the United Kingdom will carry the primary risks of the AUKUS-SSN construction.

Admiral Mead was not correct in his statement to the Senate, but more importantly, the Government has been caught red-handed fudging the risks associated with the AUKUS scheme. The public has been misled.

Admiral Mead sought to bell the cat while Defence Minister Marles has not been straight with the Australian people about the very high risks of AUKUS, even though he has been briefed on and appears to have informed Cabinet of those risks.

Marles should front up about this concealment without delay.

Labor not blameless

Last week, at a pre-polling booth, I was standing next to a Labor volunteer who was handing out how-to-vote cards for the seat of Adelaide. An elderly gentleman stuck out his hand and asked the volunteer for a how-to-vote card.

“We have to stop the Liberals getting in”, he said. “We don’t need nuclear power”.

I couldn’t resist. “But you’re taking a Labor how-to-vote”, I said. He gave me a strange look. “What about the eight naval reactors?” I queried. “A naval reactor is a reactor, and naval nuclear waste is nuclear waste”.

Many in the Labor camp think AUKUS is Morrison’s (and Peter Dutton’s) baby. But for Labor, that’s just a convenient mistruth. In September 2021, Morrison announced AUKUS. But he only announced a study. It was Prime Minister Anthony Albanese at the March 2023 San Diego “kabuki show” (as described by Paul Keating) that turned it into a formal Defence project behemoth with a projected cost of $368 billion.

Pre-polling booths are a good place to hang out for political gossip. I also held a discussion with a long-standing grassroots Labor Party member who proceeded to tell me how he had been sidelined for his opposition to AUKUS.

There’s no doubt the Labor rank-and-file have been cut out of the party’s decision-making with the Labor leadership ramming an AUKUS endorsement through the party’s 2023 national conference. Since then, the dissenting views of many, perhaps even a majority of Labor members, have been marginalised and suppressed.

AUKUS to be torpedoed

Politics aside, any project manager worth their salt would put an end to AUKUS. It’s a looming procurement shipwreck.

The US will not be able to supply the Virginia Class submarines to the Royal Australian Navy. The US Congressional Research Service has calculated a US build rate of 2.3 boats per annum is necessary to enable the US to provide boats to Australia without harming US undersea warfare capability. The current build rate is somewhere between 1.1 and 1.3 boats per annum.

The British submarine industry is one big cluster fiasco. Fruit that will flow from that program will be late, possibly rotten, and far more expensive than planned.

Meeting delivery obligations by the US and UK under the program will be really hard. And the fact that the Australian Government can’t even be up front and honest about the program

suggests there is no chance of success.

But Albanese need not worry, nor Marles. By the time all of this sinks in, they’ll be out of the system. It will be our children who suffer from the tens of billions wasted and the massive hole in our national security capability.

Dumb Ways to Buy: Defence “shambles” unveiled – former submariner and senator Rex Patrick

This post was originally published on Michael West.

A shroud of secrecy surrounds negotiations between the Labor Government and large media companies about more locally produced drama and other creative content. Andrew Gardiner reports.

The Albanese government’s self-imposed deadline ($) for local content quotas for the streaming giants quietly passed in July 2024 without any announcement. Since then, Canberra has refused to release important documents that would explain why.

What powerful force intervened? Senator Jacqui Lambie has a fair idea, and she seeks the documents to prove it in what’s turning out to be a drawn-out Freedom of Information (FOI) battle.

“I heard Minister Burke the other day telling the ABC that he believes in taking an ‘arms-length approach’ – except apparently when he is wrapping them around the US streamers,” Lambie told MWM. “This government promised they would have Aussie content quotas in place by July 2024. It’s bloody shocking!” she added with her characteristic aplomb.

Say goodbye to free sport on TV, say hello to paid streaming

There’s good, locally-produced content out there – The Last Anniversary and The Twelve come readily to mind – but only if you have a paid subscription to a select group of mainly Australia-based providers like Stan or Foxtel/Binge. With few exceptions, the rest of our media simply isn’t pulling its weight, with free-to-air TV (FTA) a virtual dead zone for locally-produced drama (soap operas aside) after the Morrison Government suspended quota regulations in 2020.

Foreign streaming channels have also dragged the chain. While local industry bodies have campaigned for mandatory local content quotas, these multinational entities lobby hard to stay on the honour system: “we’ll invest in Australian production – trust us”.

For Netflix, Disney+, Apple TV+ and Paramount+, that “trust us” investment has been little more than tokenism. Prime Video is an honourable exception.

Secret negotiations

Arts Minister Tony Burke’s refusal to release documents detailing government negotiations with media behemoths has prompted fears for the future of Australian screen production, and unease over what some see as the cosiness between media, ranging from FTA to multinational streaming behemoths, and government.

Lambie is determined to get to the bottom of how much (or little) progress there’s been on mandatory Australian content quotas on our various screens. But she’s hit a series of bureaucratic brick walls over requests for correspondence between Burke and entities like Netflix, Disney+ and our own Channels 9 and 10.

Her efforts to unravel the mystery date back to last September, when she asked under FOI for all correspondence (including emails) over a six-month period, on quotas and associated local production models, between Burke and nine streaming and media entities. Burke wrote back in November, refusing access to eight emails on the subject – six of them with attachments – that had been sent to his department, citing grounds of privacy, confidentiality and commercial sensitivity to the senders.

“I kept pushing the Minister’s office to ask them what was going on – but they were being very cagey, so I asked Rex Patrick to put in additional FOIs to find out what the hell was going on. We only got one document back that wasn’t fully redacted!”

In an appeal to the Information Commissioner, Patrick, Senate candidate for South Australia, attacked Burke’s vagueness over commercial sensitivity. “The claim … must be supported by evidence,” Patrick wrote, citing case law.

By asking for the specific reasons and evidence, Patrick was looking for what Lambie might call “the guts” of the matter: the profit margins these media behemoths and their shareholders think should be untouchable, and exempt from pesky quotas.

Then they’d share that data with the general public, asking Australians what’s more important: local screen production or multinational profits. Burke’s point blank refusal to comply is revealing, Lambie says.

“What I most want to know is what the US Streamers were saying to the Minister.

This government said we would have the quotas in place by last July before walking away from that.

“My question is: why?”

The Information Commissioner has cleared the way for the fate of these documents to be decided by the Administrative Review Tribunal (ART), where Patrick believes the need for transparency (for Australians and our screen production industry) will become abundantly clear to the presiding officer. 

“The US streamers are raking it in, and the public deserves to know just how a requirement to fund local content will affect that bottom line,” he told MWM.

Crowded market for streaming TV faces Max exodus

Public broadcasters

Even the public broadcasters, ABC and SBS, air just a handful of six- or eight-episode series each year, leaving the screen production industry on a financial precipice. Quality Australian series lasting just about the whole year on FTA are but a distant memory.

The end of quota requirements under Morrison allowed privately-owned FTA television networks to be, well, commercial. Drama is expensive; quiz shows and reality TV are not.

Foxtel’s minimum spend on drama was halved, also under Morrison, to five per cent. “They haven’t had to make more drama, so they haven’t, meaning producers are left competing for a very limited number of gigs at the streamers,” one industry source told MWM.

Screen Producers Association of Australia CEO Matt Deaner is “only too aware of the lack of transparency … around subsidies provided to US streamers, the unfair deal terms that are forced upon the domestic market, and their earnings and verifiable expenditure in this market. This situation makes it extremely difficult to understand industry trends and dynamics, let alone the implications of regulatory models put forward.”

Meanwhile, Lambie and Patrick keep plugging away in pursuit of those eight documents, sent from big media to the government, which Minister Burke doesn’t think the public deserves to see. Lambie told MWM,

If we don’t back in our Aussie Film and TV industry, we won’t have one anymore – simple as that.

But for the moment at least, those Australians who both want it and can afford it will go on paying $15 or more a month per service for what is a trickle of quality local content. You’d think that’s something Canberra would want to tackle.

Algos and major labels make life tough for Australian musos

This post was originally published on Michael West.

Although the Australian government denies exporting weapons used in the genocide in Gaza, it supplies weapons parts. Kellie Tranter of Declassified Australia has the receipts. 

The saga of Australia’s illegal ongoing supply of goods and technology that support Israel’s continuing illegal occupation of Palestinian lands, if not its genocide of the Palestinian people and other war crimes, continues. 

Declassified Australia has exclusively obtained the list of Australian export approvals to Israel for the 18 months following the October 7 Hamas attack on Israel. It provides “Goods Descriptions included in Export Declaration forms” to Israel for the period from 7 October 2023 to 29 March 2025.

The extensive list provides further evidence that Australia is in breach of its duty under Article 1 of the Genocide Convention to “undertake to prevent and punish” the crime of genocide and to employ all means reasonably available to it to prevent genocide so far as possible.

It indicates that Australia has not used its capacity to influence effectively the actions of Israeli persons likely to commit or already committing genocide, and that Australia has not, in accordance with the International Court of Justice (ICJ) ruling, been abstaining from entering into economic or trade dealings with Israel which may entrench its unlawful presence in Occupied Palestine.

The 90-page list provided to Declassified Australia by the Department of Home Affairs under Freedom of Information laws describes a smorgasbord of thousands of goods being exported directly to Israel, from electronics and communication equipment, satellite modems, tunnelling machinery parts, public works machinery, industrial machinery and parts, agricultural equipment, seeds and fertilisers, and iron and steel through to aircraft parts, engines and airfield mounting tiles and solar lights. 

Link to Exports list PDF

The list typically is terse and lacks names of suppliers or recipients and other detail so it is necessary to consider various conceded supplies in terms of their purposes and function, and from there investigate the illegal uses to which they may be put.

Declassified Australia has put a series of questions to the Defence Department (see bottom of this article) about several of these exports to Israel. Some examples of items exported raise serious questions for the Australian government.

‘T 2000 UAVL transponders’

Transponders transmit the position and altitude of aircraft and assist in identifying them on air traffic control radar. In drones, transponders provide collision avoidance and situational awareness capabilities, helping the drone maintain a safe distance from other drones or aircraft. 

In 2021, Michelle Fahy, an independent writer and researcher, reported on the Brisbane company Microair Avionics manufactured transponder, T2000 UAVL, which turned up in a downed drone in the conflict between Armenia and Azerbaijan. 

At the time Israel was reportedly the second largest supplier of weaponry to Azerbaijan, indicating the Australian company may have exported its drone transponders to Israel.

Not Just Careless: Australian weapons part turns up on Armenian battlefield

The company Microair Avionics refused to disclose the identity of the original buyer of the transponder identified in Azerjaijan. However, the Microair Avionics website previously listed Israeli company Rafael Advanced Defence Systems as “one of the company’s military industry ‘partners’, of which it has many”.

The Arms Trade Treaty (ATT) definitionally applies to [lethal] drones, even though it doesn’t mention them by name. 

The 90-page list, obtained by Declassified Australia, contains many thousands of items declared as exports from Australia to Israel since October 7, 2023. A link is provided below to the document, to aid further research on Australia’s exports to Israel.

Fresh evidence of Australian weapons being exported to Israel has been made public, showing an Australian-made ‘lethal’ remote weapons system being used in Israel, earlier this year. pic.twitter.com/ykTeLZnFST

— David Shoebridge (@DavidShoebridge) April 11, 2025

When pressed by Greens Senator David Shoebridge as to whether as at 14 June 2024 Australia was providing Israel either directly or indirectly with conventional arms and parts and components of conventional arms as defined by the Arms Trade Treaty (ATT), the Defence official responded:

“We would say the export permits that we have where Israel is a destination country relate to parts, component parts or full systems that would relate to DGSL list 1 or 2, but we would not regard them as in and of themselves as conventional arms..”

Given that concession and the fact of the Australian parts and components supply to Israel, it is imperative that the Australian Government, which proclaims ad nauseam its compliance with international law, to provide evidence that no UAV transponders exported from Australia have been used by Israel in conventional weapons or in armed or unarmed UAVs that overfly Palestinian lands.

‘Steel plates’

The 90-page list includes articles of aluminium, alloy steel, iron and steel products, bearings, machinery parts – and it lists an ANCA MX7 linear motor machine which is a versatile tool grinder designed for production grinding and steel plates.

It is publicly known that Bisalloy, an Australian company located in Wollongong, has a partnership with Rafael, the Israeli defence systems company, whereby it supplies high-strength steel plates for Rafael’s add-on armour systems.

The Australian Government needs to rule out that such components have not been incorporated into Israeli military equipment, used in the genocidal campaigns in Gaza or the West Bank. The government needs to ensure that they do not constitute trade dealings with Israel which may entrench its unlawful presence in the Occupied Palestinian Territories.

Protests as Malcolm Turnbull backed Bisalloy Steel sells armour to the IDF

‘Vehicle parts‘

In Senate Estimates on 25 October 2023, Defence officials were asked if they could give a guarantee that no material approved for export to Israel was being used in Gaza. Defence officials responded:

“On the 322 export permits for military and dual use items that you’ve referred to during that period, Australia did not, the export process did not go to lethal equipment… 

Australia’s permit process, as I’ve explained, would relate to military and dual use items, those permits would involve, I’m not going to go into the details themselves, they would involve things like radio, body armour, software, vehicle parts, sporting equipment, anything on the DGSL list.”

The 90-page list provide by Home Affairs includes a significant quantity of vehicle parts, primarily for off-road vehicles, including for ‘jeeps’, the 4WD military vehicle.

A source familiar with the situation in Gaza, spoken to by Declassified Australia, explained, “There is nothing more ubiquitous than the Jeep as sustaining the occupation of the West Bank. ‘Jeep el jesh’ – once someone says that you’ve got to scramble. Jesh is ‘army’ in Arabic. The jeep is omnipresent. It is there at checkpoints. Everywhere. It’s the occupation.”  

Many remember the 2024 images of the wounded Palestinian man strapped to the front of such a vehicle during a raid in the West Bank city of Jenin.

Whether Australia’s export of vehicles parts have been used by the IDF or the Israeli Security Forces to further its illegal occupation remains publicly unknown. And as usual the reason we have to query the export is because the Government won’t release more precise details of what is being exported, and to whom.

Nor are they telling us exactly what it is doing to ensure that our exports are not being directly or indirectly used to support the illegal occupation, as it is required to do under international law.  

Realistically, the fact that the Australian government could readily supply information to address these genuine concerns provides cause for serious apprehension, and considerable doubt.

‘The F-35 Gen III Display Visor‘

Aircraft engines, radar equipment, parts, hydraulics, cylinders, airfield and rubber mounting tiles are all items that have been exported to Israel, along with the F-35 Gen 111 Display Visor.

For the uninitiated, the “F-35 Gen III Helmet Mounted Display System’s next generation interface provides pilots with intuitive access to vast quantities of flight, tactical, and sensor information for advanced situational awareness, precision and safety”.

All the information that pilots need to complete their missions – through all weather, day or night – is projected on the “mission critical” helmet visor.

It is well known that Australian businesses are involved in the F-35 production and sustainment and that the Gen III Display Visors are developed and supplied under a joint venture between Rockwell Collins and Elbit Systems of America. 

Defence ought to respond to Declassified Australia to explain why it has permitted the export of Gen III Display Visors from Australia to Israel. If Defence asserts that the listed visors were exported to Israel for return to Australia for the purpose of ADF capability – its common fallback explanation – then it should provide evidence that that’s the case, particularly because of Israel’s egregious use of F-35s in the devastating bombardment of Gaza.

‘Fibre Optic Cables‘

The export list shows Australia has exported fibre optic cables and connectors to Israel during the genocidal period.

In February 2025 a US-based Palestinian policy network, Al-Shabaka, released a policy brief ‘Gaza’s Telecommunications: Occupied and Destroyed’ which states:

“Additionally, the Israeli government controls Gaza’s electromagnetic sphere,  heavily restricting Palestinian access to radio frequencies and internet connections. By routing all fibre-optic connections in Gaza through its territory, the Israeli regime ensures complete oversight and control over the flow of information. This control enables the deliberate manipulation of connectivity, preventing Palestinians from communicating effectively during crises and suppressing their ability to organize or resist occupation.”

It was also reported in 2023 that Israel planned to build a 254-kilometre fibre-optic cable between the Mediterranean and Red Seas, creating a continuous link between Europe and countries in the Gulf and Asia, which has the added advantage of allowing monitoring and control of information and data.

The Australian Government has not divulged the quantity, proposed location and identity of the end-user of its fibre optical cables.

‘Agricultural equipment‘

Agricultural export is one of the most profitable sectors in the Israeli economy, with most of the produce bound for European countries. Much of the agricultural produce exported from Israel is grown within Israeli settlements in the occupied Palestinian territories, while making use of water and other natural resources from occupied Palestine.

That hasn’t stopped Australia from exporting fertilisers, irrigation equipment, herbicides, insecticides, tractor parts, seeds and other agricultural equipment to Israel since October 7, 2023.

The Australian Government has not revealed whether it has sought or been provided with any evidence that such exports are not contributing to Israel’s unlawful presence in the occupied Palestinian territories.

‘Smash Hopper‘

Israeli weapons company Smart Shooter established an Australian subsidiary called SMASH Australia Pty Ltd in 2023, located in Canberra.

Smart Shooter’s ‘Smash Hopper’ appears on the released government exports list as having been exported to Israel.  It is a light-weight machine gun, described as a Remote Controlled Weapon Station.  It is “engineered for one-shot, one-hit accuracy” allowing operators “to neutralise threats from a safe distance”.

As the Smash Hopper was exported to Israel and is obviously a lethal weapon, Defence officials ought to provide an explanation about why it was exported to Israel and whether or not the export was for ADF defence capability or provided for use by the IDF.

Unexplained military and security items

The list of export approvals sought goes to well over 4,000 items, often with numerous examples of each item.

An AI analysis of the list located a further five specifically military-related exports and five specifically security-related items. Some are marked as ‘Mock Ups’, some are possibly dual-use, at least one item was apparently exported to be repaired.

The document includes the following specifically military-related items:

1. Iron Sting Mock Up ​
2. ORCWS Turret 30mm, S/N: RMA001 ​
3. M339 Tank Ammunition Mock Up ​
4. DAS Airborne System D1 Mock-Up ​
5. Iron Fist Light Configuration Active Protection System Mock-Up ​

The document includes the following specifically security-related items:

1. Security Cameras Including Thermal Imaging Cameras for Security Purposes ​
2. Radiation Survey Meter, Detector with Cable ​
3. Radiation Monitoring Probes for Repair and Return ​
4. Traffic Control Equipment Parts ​
5. Solar Airfield Lights ​

In conclusion

The 90-page export list is yet further evidence – if we needed any more – that Australia is ignoring the ICJ ruling that it abstain from entering into economic or trade dealings with Israel which may entrench its unlawful presence in the Occupied Palestinian Territories.

It also provides evidence that, as required by the ICJ, the Australian government has not employed all means reasonably available to prevent genocide so far as possible, or used its capacity to influence effectively the actions of persons likely to commit, or already committing genocide.

In response to a plea for help made in March 2025 by Perth doctor Mohammed Mustafa, who is currently in Gaza, Prime Minister Anthony Albanese said Australia is not a “major player” in the Middle East. 

Yet less than 48 hours after the 7 October 2023 uprising, Prime Minister Anthony Albanese gave contrary evidence when he  revealed on mainstream media that, “We’ve provided political support for Israel which has been what the request has been at this time.”  

So Australia was significant enough to Israel to warrant inclusion in marshalling pre-emptive political support for its accelerating indiscriminate and wholly disproportionate retaliation.

In any case, our obligations under international law are not determined by whether or not our country is a “major player”, nor can those obligations be deferred until there is a consensus position with our “likemindeds” or even between Hamas and Israel, before taking whatever meaningful and effective action is within our capacity.

Australia’s obligations under international law are not a choice. 

As a State party to the various international agreements including the United Nations Charter, the Genocide Convention and the Rome Statute, they are legal obligations that Australia has agreed to accept, duties we have assumed to act in certain ways and to refrain from acting in others. 

Australia has so far consistently failed to meet both kinds of its obligations in relation to Israel and while ever it continues to do so is in flagrant breach of the laws of the international legal system it so hypocritically espouses.

The questions:

The five questions Declassified Australia has put to the Defence Department. If relevant answers are received after the deadline date, the full responses will be published here.

1. In relation to the T2000 UAVL transponders exported from Australian to Israel between 7 October 2023 and 29 March 2025, did Defence seek, or was it provided with, evidence that no UAV transponders exported from Australia have been or were intended to be used by Israel in conventional weapons or in armed or unarmed UAVs that overfly Palestinian lands? What is the evidence?
2. In relation to steel plates exported to Israel between 7 October 2023 and 29 March 2025, did Defence confirm that such products (a) have not been and would not be used in the genocidal campaigns in Gaza or the West Bank, and (b) do not constitute trade dealings with Israel which may entrench its unlawful presence in Occupied Palestinian Territories? What evidence grounded that confirmation in each case?
3. In relation to the significant quantity of vehicle parts, primarily for off road vehicles, including Jeeps, exported to Israel between 7 October 2023 and 29 March 2025, did Defence exclude the possibility of those parts being used by the IDF or the Israeli Security Forces to further Israel’s breaches of international law by acts of aggression or occupation? On what evidence?
4. In relation to the  F35 Gen III Display Visors exported to Israel between 7 October 2023 and 29 March 2025, were the visors exported to Israel as their final destination or were they to be returned to Australia for the purpose of ADF capability? If the latter please confirm their return or provide evidence of their proposed return.
5. In relation to the Smart Shooter Smash Hopper exported to Israel between 7 October 2023 and 29 March 2025,  please explain why it was permitted to be exported to Israel.  If the claim is that the Hopper(s) were to be returned to Australia for the purpose of ADF capability, please confirm the return or provide evidence of the proposed return.

This story was first published by Declassified Australia and is republished with permission.

Future Fund war crimes profiteering … is very profitable

This post was originally published on Michael West.

The Australian War Memorial doesn’t want us to see the full history of Australian operations in East Timor, having wrapped the truth in four layers of secrecy, with even more secrecy to come. Transparency Warrior Rex Patrick reports.

It’s been like a slow-motion striptease, as bits and pieces of information about Australia’s involvement in East Timor have been released to me. It includes details about the operations of our forces with other nations, including Indonesia’s, back in the period 1999 to 2000. Some of the redacted material also relates to diplomatic strategies engaged in by the Australian government.

And it all started with Craig Stockings’ books on ‘Australian operations in response to the East Timor crisis’, books that took longer to be cleared by DFAT’s sensors than they took to write.

Neither confirm nor deny. Head officially stuck in the sand on East Timor spy scandal

After four years, I thought I had won the fight to reveal what had been censored by DFAT. On 12 April 2024, the Information Commissioner ordered the Australian War Memorial to reveal the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade’s (DFAT) dirty laundry on East Timor.

In short, the Commissioner accepted that the information to be released would subject the Australian government to criticism, but that was not reason to withhold it from the public.

However, the Government wasn’t having any of it. Lawyers were engaged by the Australian War Memorial, and an appeal was launched in the Administrative Review Tribunal (ART). A year on, the matter has not been advanced, other than by the Government, which has successfully wrapped the proceedings themselves in complete secrecy.

Secrecy quadfecta

In Freedom of Information fights, members of the public always have one hand tied behind their backs. They are not allowed to see the material that is the subject of dispute. And when secrecy is really important to Government, they can tie the other hand behind the FOI applicant’s back, too. They’ve now done that in this East Timor fight, except in a way that I have not seen before.

Their first secrecy step was to file confidential evidence and argument. Imagine a debate where one side gets to present their argument in secret; not fair obviously, but that’s what is to happen.

The government has taken a second secrecy step to add icing to the secrecy cake. The name of the person giving the secret evidence is also to be kept secret. Secret evidence from a secret person; open justice, Australian style.

I’ve little doubt that behind the War Memorial, the agencies pulling the strings here are DFAT and the Australian Secret Intelligence Service, but thanks to this ruling, that will stay in the ‘neither confirm nor deny’ zone.

When MWM first revealed this second step, the government complained to the Tribunal, but withdrew it after losing a similar complaint against me in a separate proceeding.

The secret so secret that we can’t be told its secret. What’s the scam?

Upping the secrecy ante

To further obscure the proceedings from public gaze, the government has asked the ART to move the matter to the Intelligence and Security Jurisdictional Area (ISJA) of the Tribunal. Step three complete.

I fought the third step, represented by barrister Ian Latham, acting in the public interest.. Alas, the Tribunal agreed to the government’s request and then gave open justice a fourth whack. I am not allowed to share their reasons for doing so.

Legal manoeuvres in the dark

I am in the Administrative Review Tribunal because the War Memorial appealed the Information Commissioner’s decision, but they’re not saying the Information Commissioner got it wrong.

Instead, having lost the case, the Government is appealing on a completely new and different ground: national security. No mention was made of national security concerns to the Information Commissioner – it’s only been raised because they lost and wanted a second bite of the secrecy cherry.

This abuse of process was pointed out to the Tribunal, but the Tribunal, itself a government organisation rather than a court, wasn’t too bothered about that.

In their submissions to move the proceedings to the ISJA, the War Memorial’s senior counsel (yes, only the most experienced and expensive lawyers will do when it comes to secrecy fights) argued, “In summary, the applicant submits it is readily apparent the proceeding involves ‘national security information’.

My barrister’s response to that was, “If it was readily apparent, a [national security] argument would have been advanced at the Information Commissioner review stage.”

The Tribunal went along with the government’s request. ‘Too bad, so sad’ for those who want an accurate, truthful account of our war operations history from the War Memorial.

The fight will go on, but sadly with little chance of winning. I can’t develop transparency arguments to secrecy arguments I can’t see. The Australian Government’s dirty secrets will likely stay in the shadows,

and no one will be held to account for the many failures and betrayals that characterised Australian policy towards East Timor for so long.

But as far as the government is concerned, that’s a perfect outcome. There was, of course, a promise made about a new era of transparency and accountability. I guess that wasn’t a core promise.

Downer and Howard’s East Timor lies. History missing in action.

 

This post was originally published on Michael West.

Neither of the major parties came out of the weekend’s Port of Darwin farce well. Both played pathetic local politics with more than a touch of Trump about them, writes Michael Pascoe.

How embarrassing. Labor playing a very short-term political game has allowed itself to be wedged into another dumb “national security” decision.

And, pathetically, Labor thought it was being smart, getting its wedge-driven announcement out just before Dutton thanks to a Liberal leak, according to Niki Savva.

At least this one, promising to seize the Port of Darwin lease from its legitimate owner, isn’t as expensive as the half-trillion-dollar AUKUS debacle. (Nobody believes the subs will “only” end up costing $385 billion, if they ever happen.)

Albanese’s backflip embarrassment was at least tempered by the sight of Dutton also backflipping but with an additional pike and twist, given that he was a cabinet minister in the government that permitted the sale and voiced no need to overturn it in the decade since. Indeed, the Coalition Government paid the Northern Territory $20 million to encourage it to flog the thing.

And it was just 18 months ago that Albanese ruled out attempting to cancel the Darwin lease. In reality, there was no need to; nothing had changed since the full Defence Department security assessment of the deal in 2015, as detailed by then department head, Dennis Richardson – a bureaucrat from the days of broad experience and nuance.

Port becomes political football but is ‘not for sale’

A Trumpian stench

What should be embarrassing for both sides is the Trumpy whiff around their stunt, just when everything Trump is rank, smelling to heaven.

Trump lashed Panama with his usual mix of lies, falsehoods and grievance, claiming without basis that China controls the canal and that the US would take it back.

Nek minnit, billionaire BlackRock CEO Larry Fink is on the phone to the White House and landing the biggest single infrastructure deal yet for the world’s biggest asset manager, the one with $19 trillion worth on its books and a nice line of tax minimisation. (Yes, poor little weak preyed-upon America.)

Hong Kong’s CK Hutchison, the company that operated the ports at either end of the canal, could take a hint although the sale displeased Beijing through its loss of face.

So, what little mates might Labor and the LNP be lining up for Darwin in a forced sale by Landbridge? Does anyone have Mr Fink’s number, or has he already been on the line? Anyone for “sovereign risk”? And how much compensation will taxpayers be up for if it goes to court? Landbridge has immediately stated the port is not for sale.

Cheap politics

The politics are especially cheap by the LNP. Slipping in the polls, Dutton suddenly needs to beat up a “national security” issue, one of the conservatives’ traditional polling strengths when failing, with a bit of “Chinah” bashing implied.

On second thought, no, Labor’s politics are even cheaper. It is the government. It is responsible for our commonwealth. An opposition trying to get elected can be expected to say anything. Those sitting on the Treasury benches have the benefit of incumbency, but also the restraints of actual power.

The Darwin announcement stupidly apes the international joke that is the  American president determined to bifurcate the world and damage China, our most important partner. With this stunt,

Dutton and Albanese have shown how small their world is, how limited their vision.

The US has proven unreliable on trade, on climate, and on security. Its treaties and agreements are worthless, making our relationships with the rest of the world much more important. As the US opens the door for Chinese regional leadership, it is not the time to pointlessly insult China.

Dutton has form in that regard. Overlooked everywhere but here, it was Dutton as the blabbermouth Home Affairs Minister who first threw the “China must come clean” barbs over COVID that quickly escalated into trade barriers, displaying all the diplomacy of, well, Peter Dutton.

A simple concrete thing

The Port of Darwin is a simple concrete thing. Nothing has changed about it since Dennis Richardson’s testimony, as the ABC reported, “Mr Richardson appeared before a parliamentary inquiry to give a detailed explanation of how Defence considered the implications of the lease, in the run-up to his decision to advise Treasury that Defence had no objection to the move. He said Defence assessed the risks of a shutdown or sabotage, cyber attacks, the port being used for intelligence gathering or stealing intellectual property.”

We did our due diligence very carefully over an extended period of time in respect of the Port of Darwin.

“Nothing that has been said since the announcement has given us pause for thought.” Richardson also revealed he ordered a special review of the Landbridge deal after security experts in Australia raised espionage concerns following the announcement, “After a couple of weeks of it I personally thought, ‘gee, have we missed something?”.

But he said intelligence agencies backed his initial assessment, “The written advice I received on that was that there were no significant implications and it was fine.”

Mr Richardson rubbished concerns from security analysts that the deal could give the Chinese navy access to the port as “alarmist nonsense” and “simply absurd,” and he continued, “The visit of foreign naval vessels anywhere around the world requires diplomatic clearance and that power resides within the Federal Government.”

Mr Richardson said consultations were carried out at the highest levels of government, including the National Security Committee of Cabinet, which was when a review was ordered into laws that allow states to sell strategic assets without scrutiny from the Foreign Investment Review Board.

The port remains a simple concrete thing. Nothing about it has changed, just the imperatives of weak local politicians prepared to put Australia’s best interests second to their own shallow ambitions.

Chinese spies, ports and Donald | Scam of the Week

This post was originally published on Michael West.

The Federal Government has successfully managed to bury, for twenty years, a report into how high-level AUKUS nuclear waste will be stored, and where. Transparency warrior Rex Patrick reports.

The circumstances of this case are extraordinary, as is the outcome. A report of very high public interest has effectively been hidden from view by the bureaucracy’s misrepresentation of the report’s nature and origin.

In early 2023, the Cabinet made some sort of direction for the Department of Defence to look into AUKUS’ high-level nuclear waste storage.

Ms Alexandra Kelton, a then Defence Department official and now Acting Deputy Director-General of Program and Policy in the Australian Submarine Agency (ASA) contracted a commercial company, SG Advice, to prepare a report.

This is despite the Cabinet Handbook expressly prohibiting external contractors from seeing or handling Cabinet documents.

The Cabinet Handbook states, “It is inappropriate to provide copies of, or access to, final or draft Cabinet documents to sources external to government.”

Nuclear waste. Fifty years of searching, still nowhere to dump it.

There was no evidence that a direction was made to produce a report for Cabinet. The February 2023 letter of engagement explains that the role of SG Advice would be advisory in nature and that any decision related to the storage and disposal of radioactive waste is “a decision for the Australian Government.”

Ms Kelton later deposed that the words “Australian Government” mean “Cabinet”. Administrative Review Tribunal (ART) Deputy President, Peter Britten-Jones, swallowed that.

Insecure and unsecured

Consistent with a document that is not a Cabinet document, the nuclear waste review was prepared on unclassified computers and transferred on unclassified networks across multiple agencies.

The Cabinet Handbook, which sets out Cabinet rules and is signed by the Prime Minister and Attorney General, states that in preparing Cabinet documents, such documents must be prepared on a separate secure Cabinet System called CabNet.

It further states that Cabinet Division manages and maintains the CabNet+ system, which is the real-time, secure, whole of Australian government information and communications technology system used to support the Commonwealth’s end-to-end Cabinet process.

The system provides electronic access at the PROTECTED and SECRET security classifications from approved networks across government.

It is likely that Ms Kelton and perhaps others engaged in breaches of security by not enforcing this rule. Lawyers for the Australian Submarine Agency suggested that Ms Kelton’s statement, “as a matter of practicality for communicating and formatting parts of the draft, that process occurred outside the CabNet system,

should be given more weight than the rules set by the Prime Minister and Attorney-General.

RoboDebt conduct, eat your heart out. Britten-Jones referred to these as “irregularities”, and then just moved on.

Bad decisions by ART

Britten-Jones is the Division Head of the General Division of the Administrative Review Tribunal which deals with the Tribunal’s FOI decisions. He has been with the Tribunal since 2016. He was first a solicitor, then a barrister.

Unlike Hardiman, Britten-Jones never made King’s Counsel.

Yet he saw fit to overturn the clear principle – Cabinet must commission Cabinet documents –  laid out in Hardiman’s decision, to instead make it possible for any public servant to decide something ought to go to Cabinet, a process that invokes one of the criteria to cast a secrecy blanket over a document for decades.

As things now stand, any mid-ranking bureaucrat can unilaterally declare that a report was intended for Cabinet and Cabinet secrecy will apply, shrouding failures, scandals and politically awkward problems from public scrutiny for decades.

I want to be fair to Britten-Jones. He has made some good FOI decisions. He’s also made some bad ones. The last two appeals to the Full Federal Court on his FOI decisions have delivered scathing judgments and resulted in matters being returned to the ART to be heard in accordance with law.

This latest decision is a bad one, too. It’s a very bad decision.

Sports Rorts precedent

In October 2022 the then Information Commissioner, Leo Hardiman PSM KC, ordered the Government to hand to me the Gaetjens review into Sports Rorts. Even though the head of the Public Service and Secretary of Prime Minister and Cabinet, Phil Gaetjens, had declared the document was commissioned for Cabinet.

Hardiman was not satisfied this was the case because there was no evidence that the commissioning request had come from a Cabinet Member. Long-standing convention, upon which all the law around Cabinet rests, has Cabinet setting its own agenda, not public servants.

Gaetjen’s review had been commissioned by then Prime Minister Scott Morrison, but not explicitly for Cabinet. In Hardiman’s decision, he said of Scott Morrison’s commissioning letter:

“I have considered the former Prime Minister’s letter dated 17 January 2020. There is nothing in this letter that explicitly states that the former Prime Minister intended for the Report to be submitted to the Governance Committee [of Cabinet], nor does it reference a Cabinet process.”

Gaetjen’s later claim that the review was always meant for Cabinet didn’t cut it in the absence of written evidence. The Sports Rorts review was released to me in November 2022.

A Perfect Slime: Scott Morrison’s slippery Sports Rorts report just the fix for Bridget McKenzie

High public interest

When the nuclear waste review was completed in November 2023 and sent to Defence Minister Richard Marles with a bureaucratic proposal, the review was included as an attachment to a submission to the National Security Committee (NSC) of the Cabinet.

In the brief that recommended it be attached to an NSC submission Admiral Jonathon Mead warned Marles that the report would be of high public interest. The bureaucrats in the Australian Submarine Agency were clearly worried about public reactions if the review were ever released, so they belatedly wanted it shrouded in Cabinet secrecy.

Minister Marles obliged their request and agreed to take the review to Cabinet, as an attachment to a Cabinet submission.

I guess it’s a good thing that Minister Marles recommended it be taken to NSC.

In law, the time of deciding that an attachment is for Cabinet is the moment it is brought into existence, otherwise it is not a Cabinet document. Britten-Jones decided the nuclear waste review was brought into existence for the dominant purpose of submission to Cabinet because Ms Kelton deposed that this was her plan.

A waste of money

The contract for SG Advice to produce the report was $360,000. Four Agencies were involved in compiling the report: ANSTO, ARWA, Geoscience Australia, and the Australian Submarine Agency. The work was conducted over nine months. This document is a million-dollar document.

The nuclear waste review was described by Ms Kelton as a “significant piece of policy advice and [t]he subject matter for the Review report remains current and relevant to forward Government decision-making.”

Legally, at least for now, the report is a Cabinet document.

But the Cabinet Handbook states Cabinet documents are considered to be the property of the Government of the day. They are not departmental records. As such they must be held separately from other working documents of government administration.

That means, come May 3, if Peter Dutton gets elected, this work will not be available to the Australian Submarine Agency or other Government Departments. At that point the review will be locked away at the National Archives of Australia, unavailable until at least 2044.

So as soon as the Government changes, sooner or later, it will be a case of “start again”.

Who in their right mind would nominate that a significant piece of work should be a cabinet document? It’s a costly move. But then again, the Australian Submarine Agency did decide to give the United States $4.7B to upgrade their shipyards with no clawback if those same shipyards don’t ever deliver us a submarine. Before that, the Defence Department spent $4B not buying French submarines.

It’s stuff you wouldn’t normally read about, except here at MWM.

An appeal of the decision to the Federal Court is being considered.

Status of AUKUS. US operates its subs from Base Australia?

This post was originally published on Michael West.

It was called a Budget reply, but the name was meaningless. Peter Dutton’s Thursday night effort was his election campaign pitch. Michael Pascoe reports it did have one good idea – but only one.

If there was a prize for political hypocrisy, Peter Dutton emerged as the clear winner on Thursday in a crowded field. The Opposition leader who railed against Labor’s temporary energy rebates trotted out his temporary halving of fuel excise, which was effectively the same thing. 

What’s been missed in coverage though is how much more tightly targeted, how much more politically fine-tuned this policy is and the implications for the LNP’s election hopes. 

It reinforces the idea that the Coalition is concentrating on the regions and the mortgage belt outer-urban seats. The Liberal Party has given up on the Teal seats and is likely to lose a couple more. 

It’s the mortgage belt commuters of Sydney, Melbourne and Brisbane plus the regional citizens who drive the kilometres and are already under the pump, so to speak, of the “cost of living” crisis. Knocking an immediate 25.4 cents a litre off the price of fuel, albeit only for a year, will appeal to them as the Coalition looks first and foremost to shoring up the base that has been deserting both major parties. 

The relatively inner-city and better educated Teal seats won’t be swayed by the stunt, blessed as they tend to be with good public transport and not driving gas-guzzlers. 

Populist sugar hit

As an immediate election bribe, it trumps (the word not used accidentally) Albanese’s little tax cuts in a year or two’s time, despite the massively hypocritical optics of the “party of lower taxes” voting against an income tax trimming. 

While the temporary excise reduction is politically cunning, it has been immediately derided as bad policy, even the Australian Financial Review reporting:  

“Economists warn that Peter Dutton’s pledge to halve the fuel excise is nothing more than a populist sugar hit that will disproportionately favour the wealthy and do little to address the problems plaguing the budget.”

Fair call. 

Overall, Dutton’s “Budget reply” was simply execrable, full of wild assertions, contradictions, half-truths and blatant lies, a very Trumpy exercise in “flooding the zone with shit”, impressionism politics right down to suggesting Anthony Albanese was responsible for a machete being held to someone’s neck. 

One good idea

But it did have one good idea: One of the major parties finally picked the low-hanging fruit of reserving gas for the domestic market. 

If Labor is half smart – nobody would suggest it might be any more than that – it will welcome the opportunity for a bipartisan approach to our gas demands and broadly adopt the policy, cancelling Dutton’s one good idea. 

Mind you, it is a good idea the LNP immediately compromised by pushing it a drill rig too far. In present circumstances, the reservation can be justified but only at international prices.

Dutton wants gas producers to subsidise local consumers by selling at a lower price than they can obtain overseas. That’s poor economics and bad policy – it becomes a disincentive to produce more gas, if having more gas is the aim. 

It also is a wildly woolly policy the way Dutton failed to explain it in an interview with Sarah Ferguson. Like productivity gains and less crime and more manufacturing and greater moral fibre and the tooth fairy delivering $50 notes instead of coins, Dutton would have the base believe that if he says it, gas will come. 

If I had to select one example of how bullshit-laden Dutton’s speech was, how divorced it was reality though, it was his repeated claim that he would lower inflation. 

Memo Pete: if you lower inflation from where it now is, we would have a problem. Inflation has fallen. It is in the zone it should be in. 

Inflation

Dutton and whoever makes up his stuff either didn’t see it or wilfully ignored Wednesday’s ABS monthly inflation score, overshadowed as it was in post-budget coverage. 

The consumer price index – the thing the RBA is mandated to manage  – landed at 2.4 per cent over the year to February. It’s been under or on the RBA review’s new preference of a 2.5 per cent target since September. 

Even the “trimmed mean”, the overrated and misunderstood measure the RBA prefers, came in at 2.7 per cent for the latest year. It’s been in the RBA’s actual mandated zone of 2 to 3 per cent since December. 

Dutton was doing Australia a disservice by pretending inflation was still a problem, still going up. If the RBA has any integrity, it will be cutting rates again on Tuesday.

Failing to act. RBA caught in the headlights of uncertainty.

The worst of our inflation that partly sparked our “cost of living” crisis was inherited from the Morrison Government. No impartial observer can blame the Albanese Government for that. 

And if anyone looks into the detail of actually where the worst pain in “cost of living” comes from, it is housing for those who rent and those with mortgages taken out in the last five years. 

That’s where we come back to the centrality of housing policy, where Dutton was fluffing around with the minor matters of temporarily reducing permanent migration, albeit without being able to say how, and suggesting that stopping already-curtailed foreigners buying housing for a bit might make a material difference. (It won’t as it’s already small beer.) 

Housing

The only two concrete housing policies the LNP proposes remain allowing access to superannuation, which increases buying power and therefore prices, and scrapping the Housing Australia Future Fund which over five years will deliver at least 30,000 new social housing dwellings. 

That HAFF impact is the only major initiative from anyone to actually increase supply, not just demand. 

But anything that smacks of public or social housing is anathema to the Liberal Party. Too bad about the fifth of Australians who have been priced out of the private market by three decades of policy failure. 

In short, after 1,000 words, Dutton’s campaign launch/Budget reply was another exercise in impressionism politics. No detail, just an image. It was rubbish. 

And it may work well for him. 

Oh, and like Jim Chalmers’ budget, it ignored the reality of Trump unending the world. That’s too hard for our pollies to admit. Better to just pretend it’s only a matter of tariffs and we will stay calm and carry on. You wish.  

This post was originally published on Michael West.

In defiance of international rulings to boycott Israel for its ongoing violence and brutal occupation of Palestinian lands, Australia’s exports to Israel have increased by 20% in 12 months. Kellie Tranter of Declassified Australia reports.

This month, Israel unilaterally breached its US ‘guaranteed” ceasefire agreement with Hamas. Without a trace of humanity, it resumed its wholesale murderous slaughter of Palestinian civilians, including killing 174 children with bombs in one night, with countless others requiring amputations without anaesthesia. It also launched policies calculated to deprive all residents of Gaza of essentials, including food, water, sanitary services and electricity.

Every human being with a trace of morality or humanity should be appalled, and most people of the world probably are, yet our government doesn’t seem to be so afflicted. According to Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS) data, Australia’s exports to Israel throughout the genocide – everything from coal to copper – have continued, and still continue, unabated.

Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS) export data obtained by Declassified Australia shows that the value of Australia’s exports to Israel in the year 2024 exceeded $500 million, up on the 2023 year export value figure of $419 million (Department of Foreign Affairs & Trade).

Defying the ICJ

On 26 January 2024, the International Court of Justice (ICJ) concluded that there was a plausible risk of Israel committing acts of genocide in Gaza. The Genocide Convention obliges State Parties to take action to prevent genocide. The ICJ has clarified that this obligation arises from the moment states are aware of a serious risk that acts of genocide are being committed. The Australian Government were made aware of the risk of genocide in Gaza by the ICJ’s 26 January 2024 order.

On 19 July 2024, the ICJ determined that Israel’s occupation of the Gaza Strip and the West Bank, including East Jerusalem, is unlawful, along with the associated settlement regime and the annexation and use of Palestine’s natural resources. The Court made clear that third-party states must “abstain from entering into economic or trade dealings with Israel … which may entrench its unlawful presence in the territory”.

ICJ ‘apartheid’ findings over illegal Israel settlements put Australia’s foreign policy at the brink

Furthermore, third-party states must “take steps to prevent trade or investment relations that assist in the maintenance of the illegal situation created by Israel in the Occupied Palestinian Territory”.

Declassified Australia has examined the latest ABS export data from January to December 2024, with the value of Australian exports, over half a billion dollars, included but not limited to:

• gas, natural and manufactured ($69,712,019);
• coal, coke and briquettes ($85,521,633);
• coal, whether or not pulverised, but not agglomerated ($85,169,647);
• iron and steel ($1,327,036);
• non-ferrous metals including aluminium, copper, nickel, zinc, etc ($15,297,957);
• machinery and transport equipment, including aircraft and associated equipment, spacecraft (including satellites) and spacecraft launch vehicles and parts thereof, agricultural machinery ($20,494,139);
• arms and ammunition ($294,592);
• along with insecticides, rodenticides, fungicides, herbicides, etc.

Breaching the ICJ energy embargo

Many Palestinian organisations have been calling for a total global energy embargo against Israel, recognising that Israel controls energy access in the Occupied Palestinian Territories, that the denial of access to energy and destruction of energy infrastructure have been used as part of the genocide in Gaza and that energy discrimination forms part of the Apartheid system.

In December 2024, SOMO, the Centre for Research on Multinational Corporations, located in the Netherlands, published its report, “Powering injustice – Exploring the legal consequences for states and corporations involved in supplying energy to Israel,” which noted that:

“Energy, or fuel to produce energy, plays a significant role in Israel’s military operations and unlawful presence in the Occupied Palestinian Territory.

“Israeli military vehicles, including jets and tanks, which have been used in the commission of crimes under international law in Gaza, require substantial amounts of fuel to operate. Israel has considerable dependency on imports of fuel, particularly military jet fuel and crude oil, which is refined in Israel and supplied to the military, amongst other end users.

“Israel’s electricity grid directly incorporates illegal Israeli settlements located in the West Bank, including East Jerusalem.”

The report concludes:

“Foreign governments have an obligation to end the supply of fuel to Israel unless they can guarantee it will only be used for non-military purposes” and that “states should end the supply of coal to Israel where there is no means of ensuring it does not end up supplying electricity to settlements, on the basis that this constitutes trade dealings with Israel which may entrench its unlawful presence in the Occupied Palestinian Territory”.

Colombia setting example

On 8 June 2024, Colombian President Gustavo Petro announced that his country would “suspend coal exports to Israel until it stops the genocide”. The Colombian Ministry of Commerce, Industry, and Tourism’s Decree 1047 of 2024 imposed the immediate prohibition on coal exports to Israel, remaining in force “until Israel complies with certain interim measures of the International Court of Justice. Companies involved in the coal trade with Israel should take note of this prohibition and adjust their operations accordingly”.

In November 2024, Susana Muhamad, Colombia’s Minister of Environment and Sustainable Development, unequivocally stated, ”We realised that Colombian coal was fueling 70% of Israel’s energy capabilities. President Petro has signed a decree to forbid the export of Colombian coal to Israel…

We are calling other countries to not supply fossil fuel energy used in genocide..

Colombia’s position reflects the reality that ‘fossil fuel energy’ used in an electrical grid does not distinguish between military, industrial or commercial use, noting that the 99.85 % state-owned Israel Electric is the largest supplier of electrical power in Israel and the Palestinian territories, holding about 75% of the total electricity production capacity in the country.

Australia taking advantage

Such realities did not stop Australian coal exports to Israel in 2024.

One bulk coal carrier, “Captain Veniamis”, was tracked from Newcastle in NSW to the Israeli port of Hadera, departing on 12 September 2024, arriving on 8 November 2024. Hadera, on the Mediterranean coast near Tel Aviv, hosts Israel’s largest power station, the state-owned Orot Rabin Power Plant.

The voyage via the Cape of Good Hope and the Mediterranean Sea took 52 days instead of the 32 days it would have taken if it had successfully defied the Yemen Houthi’s Red Sea blockade of cargo being shipped to Israel. (The Houthis’ solidarity with the Palestinians has increased their popularity across the Middle East and across the globe.)

At the time the cargo of Australian coal arrived in Israel, the death toll in Gaza already exceeded 40,000.

The Australian Government has been quick to endorse the US maritime mission to protect Red Sea trade routes to Israel from Houthi militants, and to provide an Australian Navy captain to ‘internationalise’ a US Navy task force assigned to protect shipping heading to Israel.

But it has been less forthcoming with information about the number of vessels en route to Israel carrying Australian goods, including goods like critical minerals and coal and gas.

Adjusting ‘arms and ammunition’ definition

ABS data confirms that the total value of exports from Australian to Israel in 2024 in the Arms and Ammunition category amounted to $294,592.

Exactly what we export under this heading is impossible for the public to know. Representatives, from Minister Wong down to Defence secretaries, ignore the statutory definitions by continually speaking of ‘weapons’ or by questioning the accuracy of embarrassing statistics.

In a June 2024 Senate Estimates hearing, David Nockels, First Assistant Secretary, Defence Industry Policy, sought to defuse media reports about data appearing on the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade website relating to the export of ‘arms and ammunition’, with a statement of which ‘Yes Minister’ Sir Humphrey would have been proud:

“The data that you’re referring to that’s been public, I think is the data that the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade publishes on its website. I think it’s useful to understand where that data is drawn from, then I’ll talk to how we assure ourselves that, even though the headline is arms and ammunition, that is not the fact the case.”

After a convoluted description of the data collection process and a deficient drop-down menu, he continues:

“We have assured ourselves that what has been publicly put forward in the media is in fact incorrect and that it is not arms and ammunition; it is in fact related to … goods and technologies that normally would flow. In particular, the most recent figure that has been referred to as $1.5 million is for a single item that is a return to Australia item that falls under the category of what we’ve just been talking about, in that it supports Australian defence capability.”

There is no mention that exporters are required to declare an actual ‘goods description’ on each Export Declaration form. This is particularly important when it is stated that the drop-down menu on the website is not reliable and not specific enough. Neither was it revealed whether Defence had inspected all the export declaration forms, which are required to describe goods within its remit being exported to Israel.

Export permits

Declassified Australia requested details of communications between Defence and Border Force on their gathering of consistent numbers on the exports to Israel. The heavily redacted Freedom of Information documents obtained show lengthy email discussions taking place between Defence and the Australian Border Force arranging for data to be supplied to Defence to account for the discrepancy in export numbers.

In Senate Estimates on 26 February 2025, Defence officials said that since 7 October 2023 Defence has issued 22 permits to Israel, 4 of which have expired, with the remaining extant [still active] export permits being for the benefit of the Australian Defence Force and Commonwealth capabilities.

For defence export permits issued prior to 7 October 2023, it was determined that no action was required in relation to 35 of them, and 16 were amended or lapsed (which related to Parts 1 and 2 of the Defence Strategic Goods List).

The other 13 permits remain under review with Defence still conducting scrutiny around those permits and providing advice to government accordingly. We aren’t told whether or not goods approved for export under those 13 permits are permitted to leave the country while such departmental review is taking place.

In response to questions put by Senator David Shoebridge, Defence officials confirmed that Part 1 of the Defence Strategic Goods List related to items that were inherently lethal or items adapted for use by defence, for example night vision goggles, body armour, software, and that they have no other use outside of a defence context, but that aren’t necessarily inherently lethal in and of themselves. Part 2 of the Defence Strategic Goods List covers goods that could be used by defence or completely unrelated industries, but nevertheless need to be controlled.

Defence official, Hugh Jeffrey, Deputy Secretary Strategy, Policy and Industry, made the point [emphasis added] that:

“The Australian government conducts a modest defence relationship with Israel when it comes to Defence exports principally it is usually one way. That is to say we are importing from Israeli Defence Industries capabilities to support the ADF. There’s not a lot going the other way but we would not regard them as in and of themselves as conventional arms.

“The permits we grant do enable us to export items that might contribute to military capabilities, and we make sure that where those export permits are granted, we need to be confident when we’re exporting the items or granting a permit to export those items that it doesn’t contribute to violations of our responsibilities.”

When pressed by Senator Shoebridge as to whether, as at 14 June 2024, Australia was providing to the State of Israel either directly or indirectly conventional arms and parts and components of conventional arms as defined by the Arms Trade Treaty (ATT), Mr Jeffrey responded:

“We classify weapons as full systems so battle tanks, aircraft, so this is what we’re talking about when we say we’re not exporting weapons and the export permits we have where Israel is a destination country relate to parts, component parts, or full systems that relate to DSGL (Defence and Strategic Goods List) list 1 or 2.

“The government has been particularly clear on this, that it has not supplied weapons or ammunition to Israel since the conflict has begun and for the past 5 years. That is with the definition used in the ATT. What that means is that if we are providing an export permit where Israel is listed as a destination country, it will include items that could be list 1 or list 2 of the DGSL, but it’s not what we would categorise as a weapon.”

Hiding behind semantics

The emphasis on using the word ‘weapons’ rather than the statutory ‘items’ is an obvious prevaricating strategy.

It’s worth noting that modern weapons and military equipment cannot be made or maintained without the parts and components. Even if the items being exported are not inherently lethal, like “body armour, software or night vision goggles”, their export to Israel during a genocide clearly is prohibited under international law, which Australia has expressly adopted by Treaty and legislated specifically to implement.

By all appearances,s Australia has effectively tried to:

circumvent its clear international obligations and its own laws during a genocide by creating a non-existent ambiguity in statutory verbiage.

In the interests of trade and geopolitics the lives and safety of our fellow beings, from infant to aged, are ignored or sidelined, along with our morality, our national reputation, our respect for international law, and indeed our self-respect.

Editor’s Note: this story was originally published by Declassified Australia

Orwell revisited. The Government playing word games with weapons to Israel

 

This post was originally published on Michael West.

Are app messages ‘Commonwealth records’? If so, why do Canberra’s elite routinely delete them via Signal and WhatsApp? Andrew Gardiner reports.

Canberra politicians and bureaucrats could be breaking the very law they supposedly strengthened late last year, by auto-deleting app messages transparency advocates say “must be made publicly available”.

Sources close to government confirm this assault on transparency (via the Signal app) yet it barely raises eyebrows at the upper reaches of Federal Government agencies, and is habitual among MPs from all sides of politics. 

What is Signal? Available on both PCs and phones, its American developers describe it as an app which provides “state-of-the-art end-to-end encryption (to) keep your conversations secure”. 

What they don’t mention, on their homepage at least, is that there’s a setting on Signal which instantly deletes messages after they’re sent. With the motive and now the means to get around pesky public records laws, Canberra officials see Signal is a must-have app. 

“Disappearing messages frustrate regular accountability measures, including FoI requests, court subpoenas and parliamentary orders for production. Any minister or official who sets up disappearing messages on a communication device used to conduct government business is, in effect, commissioning a crime under section 24(1) of the Archives Act of 1983,” former Senator Rex Patrick, a Senate candidate at this year’s federal election, told MWM. 

“It’s as simple and as serious as that”. 

By blithely deleting their sensitive messages, Canberra’s elite show scant regard for both Freedom of Information (FoI) laws and the Archives Act, the latter supposedly bolstered late last year by mandatory standards and guidelines for record keeping.

Orwell revisited. Transparency sucked down the electronic memory hole of disappearing messages

High Court ruling

But are they in for a shock? High Court rulings in 2020 and 2024 confirmed that under the Archives Act, information of some significance to the wider community (ranging from letters between Sir John Kerr and the Queen before Gough Whitlam’s dismissal to location data from a refugee’s ankle bracelet) are Commonwealth records which must be preserved and available to the public. 

If the High Court is indeed the ultimate arbiter of our laws, personal messages from a politician or bureaucrat like “what’s for dinner?” or “who’s your tip for Race 3 at Randwick?” are deletable, but suggestions for a Dorothy Dixer during Question Time, or instructions to a junior staffer on assisting Queensland during Cyclone Alfred, are likely not. 

“Messages that should be archived are instead ‘disappeared’ on Signal as a matter of course if the owner sets them to delete. And that happens all the time,” one insider told MWM. 

Further buttressing the High Court decisions, a 2022 parliamentary inquiry concluded that encrypted messages like those on Signal were Commonwealth records under the Act, and In an estimates brief last year, the Office of the Australian Information Commissioner (OAIC) insisted messages from Signal and other apps “must be filed (so) they can readily be searched and retrieved.” The NAA’s General Records Authority 38 adds some specificity: records to be lodged with and retained at NAA include a Minister’s “communication and liaison with other Ministers and Members of Parliament”. 

Clearly, the latter covers communications over Signal, and could extend to backbenchers and cross-benchers if tested in the courts. Yet no records from encrypted messaging apps have been lodged with the NAA, and messages on Signal continue to vaporise around Canberra at an alarming rate. 

Last November, Australia’s privacy commissioner began her own inquiry into the app’s widespread use by senior politicians and staffers. Patrick said the use of Signal and WhatsApp was “standard practice” in and around Parliament House.

“The use of disappearing messages is a widespread practice. The Information Commissioner should institute random checks on devices and charge ministers and officials accordingly if they’re caught with messages set to be erased,” he told MWM.

The widespread use of apps to thwart transparency reached epidemic proportions five years ago in the UK, where former Prime Minister Boris Johnson was sent super-sensitive “red box” material, including diary updates, via WhatsApp. He and other senior ministers also used Signal to delete messages on their phones, an act later deemed legal in that country. 

Here in Australia we might have more luck. Disappearing messages are yet to be directly challenged in the courts, but if and when they are, there’s every chance the practice will be outlawed if the NAA’s own rules, and the conclusions of parliamentary inquiries, commissioners and the High Court itself are any guide.   

Then it would become a question of catching the perpetrators. Which – like the government’s apparently futile attempt to keep teens off social media – might prove near-impossible. 

NAA’s website spruiks the Canberra archive as promoting “best practice management” of official records, and ensuring historically significant government information is “secured, preserved and available” to all Australians. “Our work strengthens trust in democracy and improves government transparency and accountability by connecting Australians to government decisions and activities,” the blurb adds. 

Of course, when NAA first emerged as an independent agency in 1961, computers were the size of classrooms and disappearing digital messages were the stuff of science fiction. Both the archive (which continues to see some records as “personal” and not for us) along with the laws it helps enforce, are in dire need of an update.

Privacy: hackers and spammers put your data at risk. What to do?

This post was originally published on Michael West.

Anthony Albanese has it all wrong, writes former senator and submariner Rex Patrick. He’s trying to bribe Trump with sweeteners in response to trade tariffs. Instead, he needs to tell Trump he’s prepared to take things away. 

US nuclear deterrent

Deep beneath the Indian Ocean USS Kentucky, a nuclear-powered Ohio Class Ballistic Missile Submarine (SSBN) ploughs its way through the water. Contained within its 18,750 tonne pressure hull structure are 24 Trident ballistic missiles, each capable of carrying eight nuclear warheads to targets up to 12,000 km away.

The launch of all of USS Kentucky’s missiles would, quite literally, change the world by exacting severe destruction on whole societies.

This ability to inflict damage on an exceptionally large scale is the basis of the SSBN’s deterrent capability. Unlike silo based missiles, which are vulnerable to a first strike, or aircraft delivered nuclear weapons, which can be pre-emptively hit or shot down, SSBNs are essentially invisible. They provide certainty of response.

SSBNs serve as the ultimate nuclear deterrent. They’re extremely important to the US, who’s navy possesses 14 of them. At any one time six to eight will be at sea, with four of them always on deterrent patrol. They are spread about the globe giving the US President the ability to quickly deliver return-fire with nuclear warheads at any adversary.

24/7 Operation

The primary performance metric for an SSBN is to be able to deliver its nuclear weapons with reliability, timeliness and accuracy.

The Commanding Officer of USS Kentucky must be able to loiter undetected in a place suited for the launching of weapons, be able to receive an order to launch, have an understanding of the submarine’s exact navigational position to a high degree of accuracy and have the ability to launch the weapons quickly and reliably once that order arrives.

Loitering undetected and being able to receive an order to launch is challenging. When a submarine is near the surface, their hulls can be seen by aircraft, and raised periscopes and communications masts can be seen visually and on radar. Operating a submarine at shallow depth can also result in acoustic counter-detection.

The Commanding Officer of USS Kentucky knows that deep is the place to be. 

But being deep frustrates a submarines ability to receive communications, particularly an ‘emergency action message’.

And that’s were Very Low Frequency (VLF) communications stations come into play. In conjunction with a submarine’s buoyant wire antenna – a long wire that sits just below the sea surface – they can receive a launch command from the President.

The US has a network of these VLF communication stations around the world including in Maine, Washington state and North West Cape, Australia. 

North West Cape

The VLF Communication Facility at North West Cape (NAVCOMMSTA Harold E Holt) has been in operation since 1967. Born of secrecy, it was at first exclusively US operated until 1974 when the facility became joint and started communicating with Australian submarines. In 1991 it was agreed that Australia would take full command in 1992 and US Naval personnel subsequently left in 1993.

The facility’s deterrence support role now rests on a 2008 treaty which, ratified in 2011, is formally titled the “Agreement between the Government of Australia and the Government of the United States of America relating to the Operation of and Access to an Australian Naval Communication Station at North West Cape in Western Australia”.

The station’s antenna is 360 meters high, with a number of supporting towers in a hexagon shape connected to it by wires. Considered to be the most powerful transmitter in the southern hemisphere, it transmits on 19.8 kHz at about 1 megawatt.

The station enables emergency action messages to be relayed to submerged SSBNs, like USS Kentucky, when operating in the Indian and Western Pacific oceans.

If the facility was taken out by a first strike nuclear attack, the US Air Force can temporarily deploy Hercules ‘TACAMO’ aircraft, with a long VLF wire they deploy while airborne. It’s a back-up measure with much lower transmission power capabilities.

A bedrock of certainty

After US steel and aluminium tariffs were put into play, the Australian Financial Review ran with a headline “How Australia was blindsided on the US tariffs”. The article opened with, “Australia pulled out all stops to avoid Donald Trump’s duties on steel and aluminium, but it’s impossible to negotiate with someone who doesn’t want anything”.

But the US does want something.

A fact not so well appreciated with respect to nuclear deterrence is it must be seen to be a robust and continuous capability. Onlookers must see a 24/7 capability including deployable submarines manned by well-trained crews, proven and reliable missile systems, an organised strategic command, a continuous communication system that reliably links that strategic command to the submarines with appropriate redundant communication pathways, training facilities and maintenance support. 

Potential adversaries must know that they could be struck by an SSBN that could be lurking anywhere in the world’s major oceans.

Effective nuclear deterrence must be built on a bedrock of operational certainty.

Remove the transmitter keys

North West Cape forms part of that certainty. 

Australia has the keys to take some certainty away. Without our cooperation the US can’t operate a certain global deterrent capability. Turning off transmissions at North West Cape reduces the effectiveness of the US nuclear deterrence while eliminating one Australian nuclear target.

US Australia prepare for war with China, remain mute on consequences of nuclear attack – FOIs

The North West Cape Treaty provides leverage. While the agreement has another decade to run, Article 12 provides that “either Government may terminate this Agreement upon one year’s written notice to the other Government.”

It’s open to Australia to signal or give actual notice of termination. That would focus up policy makers in Washington.  

Would we do that to a mate? No, but the US is showing they are not a mate. They are not showing us loyalty we have showed them. Other actions; abandoning Ukraine, threatening Greenland and Panama and a not so subtle push to annex Canada have also shown they are an unreliable ally who doesn’t share our values.

Trump cards

In negotiating with President Zelensky over the war in Ukraine, President Trump told him in no uncertain terms. “We’re going to feel very good and very strong. You’re, right now, not in a very good position. You’ve allowed yourself to be in a very bad position. You don’t have the cards right now with us.”

But Australia does have Trump cards; North West Cape, Pine Gap, US Marine Rotational forces in Darwin, AUKUS and/or critical minerals that the US needs. Perhaps it’s also time to cancel the traitorous quantum computing development contract given to a US company over Australian companies.

Quantum Betrayal: why is the government favouring Palo Alto over Parramatta?

These are things that we can put on the table. But doing that requires a measure of boldness. Our problem is our Prime Minister doesn’t have the ticker. Neither does the opposition leader. They are with Trump internationally as they are with the gas cartel domestically; owned and weak. 

Things have changed

Alliances are means to ends, not an end in themselves; and, as pointed out above, things have changed. We can pretend everything is okay, but that doesn’t make it so.

But the bureaucracy is unlikely to advise the Government of alternatives.

Our uniformed leaders are locked into AUKUS, a program that gives them relevance at the big table; something they wouldn’t otherwise have with the depleted Navy they’ve built out of their procurement incompetence. They’re clinging to that relevance, despite all signs showing the program is running aground.

Our spooks are in the same place. In response to calls to put Pine Gap on the table, former Home Affairs Secretary Mike Pezzullo (sacked for failing to safeguard sensitive government information) spoke out putting the facility ahead of trade interests and Aussie jobs.

The bulk of the intelligence from Pine Gap is very useable for the US and rather less so for Australia. Senior spooks just want to maintain their own relevance in the Five Eyes club; but it’s a mistake to conflate their interest with our national interest. 

We should be prepared to play our Trump cards and we should be prepared to face the national security consequences.

If that means an Australia that‘s more independent and more self-reliant, that would be a very good thing.  If there’s a shock to the system, then all well and good, because in the changing world we find ourselves in, it might be the only thing that wakes the Canberra bubble from its stupor and pushes us to actually be prepared.

In these uncertain times, there are no hands more trustworthy than our own.

This post was originally published on Michael West.

Anthony Albanese has it all wrong, writes former senator and submariner Rex Patrick. He’s trying to bribe Trump with sweeteners in response to trade tariffs. Instead, he needs to tell Trump he’s prepared to take things away. 

US nuclear deterrent

Deep beneath the Indian Ocean USS Kentucky, a nuclear-powered Ohio Class Ballistic Missile Submarine (SSBN) ploughs its way through the water. Contained within its 18,750 tonne pressure hull structure are 24 Trident ballistic missiles, each capable of carrying eight nuclear warheads to targets up to 12,000 km away.

The launch of all of USS Kentucky’s missiles would, quite literally, change the world by exacting severe destruction on whole societies.

This ability to inflict damage on an exceptionally large scale is the basis of the SSBN’s deterrent capability. Unlike silo based missiles, which are vulnerable to a first strike, or aircraft delivered nuclear weapons, which can be pre-emptively hit or shot down, SSBNs are essentially invisible. They provide certainty of response.

SSBNs serve as the ultimate nuclear deterrent. They’re extremely important to the US, who’s navy possesses 14 of them. At any one time six to eight will be at sea, with four of them always on deterrent patrol. They are spread about the globe giving the US President the ability to quickly deliver return-fire with nuclear warheads at any adversary.

24/7 Operation

The primary performance metric for an SSBN is to be able to deliver its nuclear weapons with reliability, timeliness and accuracy.

The Commanding Officer of USS Kentucky must be able to loiter undetected in a place suited for the launching of weapons, be able to receive an order to launch, have an understanding of the submarine’s exact navigational position to a high degree of accuracy and have the ability to launch the weapons quickly and reliably once that order arrives.

Loitering undetected and being able to receive an order to launch is challenging. When a submarine is near the surface, their hulls can be seen by aircraft, and raised periscopes and communications masts can be seen visually and on radar. Operating a submarine at shallow depth can also result in acoustic counter-detection.

The Commanding Officer of USS Kentucky knows that deep is the place to be. 

But being deep frustrates a submarines ability to receive communications, particularly an ‘emergency action message’.

And that’s were Very Low Frequency (VLF) communications stations come into play. In conjunction with a submarine’s buoyant wire antenna – a long wire that sits just below the sea surface – they can receive a launch command from the President.

The US has a network of these VLF communication stations around the world including in Maine, Washington state and North West Cape, Australia. 

North West Cape

The VLF Communication Facility at North West Cape (NAVCOMMSTA Harold E Holt) has been in operation since 1967. Born of secrecy, it was at first exclusively US operated until 1974 when the facility became joint and started communicating with Australian submarines. In 1991 it was agreed that Australia would take full command in 1992 and US Naval personnel subsequently left in 1993.

The facility’s deterrence support role now rests on a 2008 treaty which, ratified in 2011, is formally titled the “Agreement between the Government of Australia and the Government of the United States of America relating to the Operation of and Access to an Australian Naval Communication Station at North West Cape in Western Australia”.

The station’s antenna is 360 meters high, with a number of supporting towers in a hexagon shape connected to it by wires. Considered to be the most powerful transmitter in the southern hemisphere, it transmits on 19.8 kHz at about 1 megawatt.

The station enables emergency action messages to be relayed to submerged SSBNs, like USS Kentucky, when operating in the Indian and Western Pacific oceans.

If the facility was taken out by a first strike nuclear attack, the US Air Force can temporarily deploy Hercules ‘TACAMO’ aircraft, with a long VLF wire they deploy while airborne. It’s a back-up measure with much lower transmission power capabilities.

A bedrock of certainty

After US steel and aluminium tariffs were put into play, the Australian Financial Review ran with a headline “How Australia was blindsided on the US tariffs”. The article opened with, “Australia pulled out all stops to avoid Donald Trump’s duties on steel and aluminium, but it’s impossible to negotiate with someone who doesn’t want anything”.

But the US does want something.

A fact not so well appreciated with respect to nuclear deterrence is it must be seen to be a robust and continuous capability. Onlookers must see a 24/7 capability including deployable submarines manned by well-trained crews, proven and reliable missile systems, an organised strategic command, a continuous communication system that reliably links that strategic command to the submarines with appropriate redundant communication pathways, training facilities and maintenance support. 

Potential adversaries must know that they could be struck by an SSBN that could be lurking anywhere in the world’s major oceans.

Effective nuclear deterrence must be built on a bedrock of operational certainty.

Remove the transmitter keys

North West Cape forms part of that certainty. 

Australia has the keys to take some certainty away. Without our cooperation the US can’t operate a certain global deterrent capability. Turning off transmissions at North West Cape reduces the effectiveness of the US nuclear deterrence while eliminating one Australian nuclear target.

US Australia prepare for war with China, remain mute on consequences of nuclear attack – FOIs

The North West Cape Treaty provides leverage. While the agreement has another decade to run, Article 12 provides that “either Government may terminate this Agreement upon one year’s written notice to the other Government.”

It’s open to Australia to signal or give actual notice of termination. That would focus up policy makers in Washington.  

Would we do that to a mate? No, but the US is showing they are not a mate. They are not showing us loyalty we have showed them. Other actions; abandoning Ukraine, threatening Greenland and Panama and a not so subtle push to annex Canada have also shown they are an unreliable ally who doesn’t share our values.

Trump cards

In negotiating with President Zelensky over the war in Ukraine, President Trump told him in no uncertain terms. “We’re going to feel very good and very strong. You’re, right now, not in a very good position. You’ve allowed yourself to be in a very bad position. You don’t have the cards right now with us.”

But Australia does have Trump cards; North West Cape, Pine Gap, US Marine Rotational forces in Darwin, AUKUS and/or critical minerals that the US needs. Perhaps it’s also time to cancel the traitorous quantum computing development contract given to a US company over Australian companies.

Quantum Betrayal: why is the government favouring Palo Alto over Parramatta?

These are things that we can put on the table. But doing that requires a measure of boldness. Our problem is our Prime Minister doesn’t have the ticker. Neither does the opposition leader. They are with Trump internationally as they are with the gas cartel domestically; owned and weak. 

Things have changed

Alliances are means to ends, not an end in themselves; and, as pointed out above, things have changed. We can pretend everything is okay, but that doesn’t make it so.

But the bureaucracy is unlikely to advise the Government of alternatives.

Our uniformed leaders are locked into AUKUS, a program that gives them relevance at the big table; something they wouldn’t otherwise have with the depleted Navy they’ve built out of their procurement incompetence. They’re clinging to that relevance, despite all signs showing the program is running aground.

Our spooks are in the same place. In response to calls to put Pine Gap on the table, former Home Affairs Secretary Mike Pezzullo (sacked for failing to safeguard sensitive government information) spoke out putting the facility ahead of trade interests and Aussie jobs.

The bulk of the intelligence from Pine Gap is very useable for the US and rather less so for Australia. Senior spooks just want to maintain their own relevance in the Five Eyes club; but it’s a mistake to conflate their interest with our national interest. 

We should be prepared to play our Trump cards and we should be prepared to face the national security consequences.

If that means an Australia that‘s more independent and more self-reliant, that would be a very good thing.  If there’s a shock to the system, then all well and good, because in the changing world we find ourselves in, it might be the only thing that wakes the Canberra bubble from its stupor and pushes us to actually be prepared.

In these uncertain times, there are no hands more trustworthy than our own.

This post was originally published on Michael West.

Where to store nuclear waste from AUKUS submarines is a decision which will impact us for millennia, but they are going to extraordinary lengths to hide it from the public. Rex Patrick reports.

Somewhere deep inside a locked government filing cabinet within Australia’s labyrinthine Defence bureaucracy, there’s a document intended to advise the Government on what locations in Australia might be suitable to store high-level nuclear waste and how to select one of those locations.

It’s a roadmap to where the most toxic material on our planet may be dumped for tens of thousands of years. The report itself is just paper, but it’s red hot. It’s politically radioactive.

The document in question is the result of a $360,000 February 2023 contract to a company called SG Advice. The principal of SG Advice was tasked with coordinating the Australian Nuclear Science and Technology Organisation, the Australian Radioactive Waste Agency, the Australian Submarine Agency, Defence, and Geoscience Australia to produce a “significant piece of policy advice” for the government.

Nuclear waste. Fifty years of searching, still nowhere to dump it.

The document is being held secret despite the obvious fact that a decision on a location for a high-level nuclear waste facility will be a decision with impacts which will last for millennia.

The government doesn’t want the public to see it – it’s just too controversial. All the more reason then for me to seek access to it using our Freedom of Information laws.

A Cabinet document

When I requested the report, the newly minted Submarine Agency told me I couldn’t have it because it was a cabinet document. But when I thought about the nature and purpose of the report, this didn’t make sense.

The Cabinet Handbook, the authoritative rules governing all matters relating to Cabinet, states that “… Cabinet documents are … not the property of … [the] department. Access to them by succeeding governments is not granted …”

If this ‘significant piece of policy work’ dealing with the problem of high-level nuclear waste in a multi-decade program was a Cabinet document, it would only be available to the Department for the period that the Albanese Government was in power. If there was a change of Government, the work that was done would go into the archives and would not be available for reference by future governments, at least not for 20 years. So, the nuclear waste planning would have to be revisited from scratch.

But the Submarine Agency went to the Administrative Review Tribunal with its taxpayer funded lawyers to argue that the report was a Cabinet document and consequently must remain secret.

Government Ministers and bureaucrats love Cabinet-in-confidence exemptions because if they’re upheld, it’s ‘all over red rover’ as far as any public access is concerned. First Assistant Director-General of the Submarine Agency, Alexandra Kelton, deposed:

… my understanding at all times was that the final Review report would be a document submitted to the [National Security Committee of Cabinet] for its consideration.

If it was intended for Cabinet, then the Submarine Agency had engaged in wasteful administrative folly.

Document purpose

In order for the Tribunal to find that the report was a Cabinet document, it needed more than just evidence that it has been to Cabinet. The FOI Act demands that the Agency must show, with probative evidence, that the report was

brought into existence for the dominant purpose of submission for consideration by the Cabinet.

The only evidence before the Tribunal that the document was born with Cabinet submission in mind was in the $360,000 contract to SG Advice Pty Ltd which stated, “Any decision related to locations for the storage and disposal of radioactive waste is a decision for the Australian Government.”

Ms Kelton deposed, “The capitalised reference to ‘Australian Government’ in the [contract] is synonymous with Cabinet. That is a common expression in Defence and [the Submarine Agency] when referring to Cabinet.”

Instead of using the word ‘Cabinet’, Ms Kelton used the broader multi-definitional word “Australian Government”. She could have used “Cabinet” but she chose to be ambiguous.

The contract to commence the report was signed in late February 2023. The report was completed in November 2023. Only after the document was finalised was it sent to the Defence Minister, suggesting it should go to Cabinet. In the covering brief, the Submarine Agency raised the political sensitivity of the content of the report.

Despite the attempt by the agency to wrap the report in a 20-year-long secrecy blanket, it’s likely the Tribunal will rule in my favour and we will all get to see the report. It should not otherwise be kept secret.

Reckless conduct

The Submarine Agency will bear the ultimate responsibility for Australia’s nuclear stewardship under the AUKUS agreement and in relation to our nuclear non-proliferation obligations with the International Atomic Energy Agency. Those stewardship obligations include commissioning, operating, maintaining, and decommissioning reactors and disposing of their high-level waste.

The Submarine Agency promotes the idea that it will manage all nuclear activities safely, informed by international best practices. Yet its approach to the nuclear waste report shows otherwise.

If we indulge the Submarine Agency for a moment and believe that the nuclear waste report was for Cabinet, their conduct and care of this report has been reckless.

They’ve been playing fast and loose with rules that are laid down at the highest level of the Australian Government; rules approved by Prime Minister Albanese and the Cabinet Secretary, Attorney-General Dreyfus, and endorsed by Cabinet itself.

Ignoring the rules for convenience

The Cabinet Handbook states that it is inappropriate to provide copies of, or access to, final or draft Cabinet documents to sources external to government. Yet, in total disregard for that rule, the Submarine Agency contracted the consulting company SG Advice PTY LTD to lead the review and the report writing team.

Moving on, there exists a real-time, highly secure, whole of Australian government information and communications technology system used to support the Commonwealth’s end-to-end Cabinet process. It’s called CabNet+.

The Cabinet Handbook states Cabinet documents, including pre-exposure drafts, exposure drafts, drafts for coordination comments, final submissions, and drafting comments (including coordination comments), must only be circulated via the CabNet+ system to ensure that they are circulated securely and that copies of the documents can be accounted for.

It is important, therefore, that exposure drafts, drafts or finals (either in the template or in a document which looks like a Cabinet submission) are not circulated by any other means.

It goes on to state: Similarly, substantive comments on submissions should only be transmitted via CabNet+.

And yet all the work associated with the nuclear waste site report was carried out on standard departmental networks.

Much of the communication was only marked official (unclassified), including emails that contained drafts of the report. In response to the argument that the report could not be a Cabinet document because it was not prepared and stored on CabNet+ Ms Kelton deposed, “The process for planning and drafting the Review report was collaborative and iterative. As a matter of practicality for communicating and formatting parts of the draft, that process occurred outside the CabNet system.”

So, one of the most senior people in an Agency responsible for stewardship of high-level nuclear waste has indicated that it’s OK to depart from mandatory requirements. 

How’s that for knocking people’s confidence in an organisation’s ability to manage highly radioactive nuclear material.

In the lead up to the hearing, the government’s lawyers threatened me not to reveal these details.

Nuclear waste. AUKUS agency’s reckless indifference

Stop the secrecy!

Yes, the report I’m after relates to a highly controversial topic and one of great importance. It relates to the location of an AUKUS spent nuclear fuel repository. But it’s a document that ought to be made public … and especially so because of its controversy.

Prime Minister Albanese insisted that Opposition Leader Dutton be transparent about the sites of his seven proposed nuclear power reactors.

Dutton obliged.

Yet Albanese has obstinately resisted disclosure of documentation about the location of a future High Level Nuclear Waste facility.  It’s almost certainly politically radioactive, but politics is no justification for secrecy.

Moreover, this is a document that will inform government decisions of an indefinite character. Wherever the nuclear waste goes, it will go there for good.

The need for full public and expert scrutiny of this report is absolutely compelling.

Before he won high office, Anthony Albanese promised openness and transparency.  Even if the nuclear waste report were a Cabinet document, he could authorise its release. That’s always in his power.

That he has refused to do so, sends my secrecy Giger Counter way into the red zone; maxed out by wilful obstruction and shameless hypocrisy.

AUKUS waste plans. The hitchhiker’s guide to nuclear approvals

This post was originally published on Michael West.

Israel campaigners Ofir Birenbaum and Sophie Calland have infiltrated the Labor Party backed by far-right money. Wendy Bacon and Yaakov Aharon report.

It is shaping up as a prelude for the Federal Election; and ultra-Zionist social media influencers and Labor Party members Ofir Birenbaum and Sophie Calland are not on their first rodeo.

Calland is a key organiser of Better Australia, a new third party group that is currently being registered to play a role in the upcoming Federal Election in attacking the Greens and the Teals for threatening “Australia’s economic and social stability” and their views on Israel’s war on Gaza.

According to a draft document leaked to The Guardian, Better Australia will be pitched as an “authentic and diverse community ‘ground force’ to create a social movement.” It’s a strategy designed to hide its far-right connections.

Dark Money. Hard-right Advance targets Greens, Teals with $14m warchest

NSW Labor recruited Calland as a member in October 2023, where she is active in Alexandria branch meetings and discussions. Calland also joined Labor Friends of Israel.

Alexandria meetings are regularly attended by local state MP Ron Hoenig MP, the NSW Minister for Local government. Hoenig is a former chair and current member of NSW Parliamentary Friends of Israel.

Calland’s husband, Ofir Birenbaum, is a “close friend of the Australian Jewish Association” (AJA) which is on the far-right of Zionist politics and a strident critic of the Albanese government.

AJA President David Adler is a founder member and advisor of astroturfing lobby group Advance that has amassed $14 million to target Greens and Teals and to a lesser extent Labor in the coming Federal election.

Birenbaum is also a Labor party member. He joined the Rosebery Branch of Labor in November 2024. This is the home branch of the Minister for Environment and MP for Sydney, Tanya Plibersek.

Birenbaum came to prominence recently when he teamed up with Daily Telegraph’s Danielle Gusmaroli to document alleged antisemitic experiences in Sydney. The plan went wrong.

Following legal threats, Cairo Takeaway has since retracted its allegations that Birenbaum tried to provoke an antisemitic incident. Birenbaum has consistently denied the allegation.

Birenbaum’s links with extreme Zionist organisations have already been exposed. He is a ‘close friend’ of the Australian Jewish Association, a leader in Together with Israel and an early organiser with Christian Zionist organisation Never Again is Now.

Since last Sunday evening, Birenbaum has erased the last of his social media pages and digital footprint.

Sophie Calland was the public face of the astroturfing campaign Better Council Inc during the local government elections in September 2024, having authorised all the election materials.

However, the owner of Better Council’s ABN is Alex Polson, an LNP member who previously worked for Senator Simon Birmingham. Like most of the other members of the Better Council organising team, Polson was a key organiser in Together with Israel.

Better Council – more Labor than grassroots

Better Council urged voters to ‘PUT GREENS LAST’, claiming the Greens had betrayed their environmental roots for an antisemitic obsession with Israel, leaving behind their environmental roots.

Birenbaum was an organiser with Better Council. In August 2024, he recruited volunteers, accused unnamed councillors of inciting antisemitism, and staffed polling booths in Marrickville, Balmain and Stanmore.

Several Inner West Greens members told MWM they had observed Labor volunteers helping Better Council volunteers to pack up their equipment at the end of the daily pre-poll period.

At a Better Council Zoom meeting, volunteers were told that the Inner-West campaign was a reward for Mayor Darcy Byrne’s strong resistance to an August 2024 Boycott Divestment Sanctions motion, similar to one passed by the Labor-run Bankstown-Canterbury Council. 

The Greens lost three Councillor positions in the Eastern suburbs but these were more than balanced by fresh wins in western Sydney and City of Sydney LGAs. The Inner West Greens held their existing five positions but failed to make gains. In a very tight election, Mayor Darcy Byrne and Labor consolidated his control over the Inner West Council.

Better Council considered their campaign a success and held a celebration in mid-November at a luxury unit in the Cosmopolitan Hotel of glitzy Double Bay.

Advance trials election strategy in Queensland

Just weeks after the NSW local government elections, Better Council’s electoral strategy was adopted for the Queensland state elections by the newly-formed Queensland Jewish Collective (QJC).

QJC partnered with the Australian Jewish Association and was supported by Queensland Zionist and financier Stephen Fenwick who previously donated $1 million to Advance. QJC’s front person and director is Israeli Australian Hava Mendelle, whose recently migrated Israeli wife Roz Mendelle, a strategic communications specialist, is also heavily involved.

The campaign had few volunteers and relied heavily on billboards, some of which were very similar to Advance ones. It may have played a role in one Green state MP Amy McMahon narrowly losing her seat, and with no new seats won for the Greens.

By October, Advance had announced that it had raised millions that would be used to try to smash the Greens in the coming Federal election. Its biggest donor last year was the Liberal aligned Cormack Foundation. 

Advance used some of those funds in the Prahran state by-election in Victoria. The Greens maintained their primary vote but failed to get sufficient preferences to hold the seat. 

Like fellow astro-turfer Calland, Hava and Roz Mendelle have re-emerged ahead of the upcoming Federal election as part of a recently formed organisation Minority Impact Coalition (MIM). that aims to put pressure on Labor not to preference Greens.  

MIM links are right-wing but it describes itself as ‘grassroots’. It claims to have no links to Advance. 

Roz Mendelle will be speaking about ‘taking on the Greens’ at an event hosted jointly by Advance and AJA this week. 

Mission accomplished Birenbaum also joins Labor

With the Better Council campaign behind her, Calland became a regular attendee of Labor NSW’s Alexandria branch meetings, where she has strongly supported Israel against accusations of genocide.  

Birenbaum also made a decisive move. He joined NSW Labor and has attended one or more Rosebery meetings. 

In the past 18 months, motions in support of a Gaza ceasefire and recognition of a Palestinian state have been passed throughout several of Sydney’s Labor branches.

Even before his membership of the Rosebery branch came through, Birenbaum tried to influence the debate inside Labor.

A Labor Friends of Palestine motion was before the October meeting of the Alexandria branch. Birenbaum attended the meeting as a guest. The LFOP motion easily passed. Calland was one of two people who voted against it. Six members voted for the motion and one abstained. 

Calland then moved a counter motion which opposed a ceasefire. Birenbaum – who has served in the IDF – spoke and vigorously defended the IDF against allegations of war crimes. Calland’s motion was ruled out of order as inconsistent with the previous motion.

Undercover Birenbaum sets up Greens candidate

But as well as continuing with his public pro-Israel right-wing activities, Birenbaum became involved in some covert campaigning of his own. 

Luc Velez, the Greens’ federal candidate in the seat of Sydney held a stall in Green Square on December 11. He was accompanied by two other Greens campaigners that day. Velez is a well known housing, climate and queer activist. 

Birenbaum approached the stall and asked for a leaflet. According to observers, he then left and returned wearing what Velez realised were video glasses. 

Birenbaum started quizzing Velez on Greens’ policy on Palestine. Velez answered by mentioning Greens’ support for human rights and international law.

He became aware that Birenbaum was using the glasses to film him.

Later Birenbaum posted the video that he had shot covertly on his Facebook page. It was there until recently, but has now been removed.    

This post triggered many responses, including homophobic ones. 

These were not removed by Birenbaum. MWM’s reporters independently verified these responses, which remained on Birenbaum’s account until last week.

Birenbaum has posted many images and comments which are offensive to the Muslim community and followers of Islam. 

In Newcastle, he filmed a small peaceful pro-Palestinian protest for more than half an hour and then interacted with protesters complaining that he felt unsafe, observers told MWM. He also used his video glasses to film undercover at Sydney’s Invasion day rally.

He took his dog Oreo to Greens Deputy Leader Mehreen Faruqi’s animal rights launch in Sydney Park in Inner Sydney. He later posted a positive comment on his dog Oreo’s own Facebook page (also disappeared) but added that it was a pity they (animal rights campaigners) had killed his grandmother. 

Since he became a Labor member, Birenbaum has also continued to lead and speak at Together with Israel rallies which were organised as responses to the anti-semitic graffiti and arson attacks that spread fear and concern in the Jewish community and broader community. Here he has spoken alongside Senator David Sharma and retired MP Michael Danby who founded Labor Friends of Israel. 

Many of the placards and speeches at the rallies were hostile to the Labor government’s claimed weakness on anti-semitism, although active support from Labor friends of Israel has also featured prominently.   

Birenbaum told a rally in January, “The time for lip service [to antisemitism] is over, and the time for actions – not just from us, but from our [Australia’s political] leaders – is now. No more press conferences, no more concerned looks, and no more [empty words, like] ‘this has no place in Australia’.

“Our leaders cannot just throw more money at security, at a task force for this, and a strike force for that – it does not treat the problem, it treats a symptom.

So I’m asking [Albanese] once again, what are you going to do about it?”

Pictured: L-R Michael Danby(ex-Labor MP and Labor Friends of Israel), Ofir Birenbaum (Together with Israel, friend of Australian Jewish Association), Michael Easson (former VP of Labor Party NSW), Rabbi Benjamin Elton(Senior Rabbi Great Synagogue Sydney at a December 2024 rally. Source: ‘Together With Israel’ Facebook

What Labor did about it

The power couple spurred debate across the country yet again in December 2024. While they were on their way to a celebration of Israeli technology event staged at the Great Synagogue in Sydney’s CBD, they stopped to make a detour.

Wearing his infamous spy glasses, Birenbaum began secretly recording a Palestine protest occurring outside the synagogue’s entrance.

Birenbaum happened to “have an Israeli flag with him”, which he unravelled while standing across the road from the protest. Police moved Birenbaum on, alleging his action was provocative.

The media circus followed. The Australian Jewish Association tweeted about their “friend”, a “Jew [was] detained outside Sydney’s Great Synagogue for having an Israeli flag.” This incident was then featured in a Sky News story in which right-wing presenter Chris Kenny interviewed Birenbaum.

This incident provided part of the  political context for Labor’s NSW premier Chris Minns to condemn the Palestine protest as “disturbing”, and called for “urgent change” to protest laws outside places of worship. 

“Demonstration and protests are important, but so is the principle that all Australians have a right to practice their faith free of intimidation or free of protest,” Premier Minns said. In February, the NSW government passed a suite of tough new laws limiting speech and protests. 

Meanwhile, Albanese government passed the strongest hate speech laws and doxxing laws with mandatory sentencing, with many arguing the goal was to silence free speech about Israel. 

The state and federal Labor party leaders have passed reforms that Birenbaum,  Calland and other extreme Zioinists had lobbied for. 

Birenbaum would regularly upload secretly-recorded videos of anti-Zionists, with mentions of their names, workplace, and immediate family. 

Time will tell if the true purpose of the doxxing and hate speech laws is to protect all members of Australian society, or simply to target Pro-Palestinian activists and other dissenters.

Watershed moment for Greens

Many Labor grassroots supporters would not recognise themselves in the political activities of their fellow party members Calland and Birenbaum.  

The stakes are high for the Greens. This week, Greens leader Adam Bandt accused Advance and other third party campaigners of falsely claiming to be community-based. 

“The nation’s billionaires are running the same Trump-style disinformation campaign they did during The Voice, using donations from coal and gas billionaires and the Liberals to build astroturfing groups in a desperate attempt to stop the Greens.”

“This election is make or break for their ability to keep profiteering off the climate crisis. Experts predict a minority Parliament, where the Greens will keep Dutton out and push Labor to tax the billionaires behind Advance, helping us get dental and mental health into Medicare and build affordable housing.”

MWM has sent questions to Ron Hoenig and Tanya Plibersek and will report their responses when they reply. Sophie Calland was contacted but has not respond. 

Inside the ARC of Israel influence in the Queensland Election

This post was originally published on Michael West.