Rex Patrick writes that there is clear public interest in constituents of George Christensen and other MPs knowing that their representative has a risk of compromise attached to his activities in the Parliament.
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A decade of coups has caused the Australian Parliament to be a fragile example of the way that democracy is meant to work. However, no matter whether you belong to right or left, we can acknowledge the fact that the arrival of the Albanese Government has changed the political atmosphere around the nation and created …
Continue reading A WEEK IN THE HALLS OF POWER
The post A WEEK IN THE HALLS OF POWER appeared first on Everald Compton.
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Rex Patrick is fighting for the release of documents which expose Australia’s spying on Timor-Leste to cheat the little country out of oil and gas reserves. He is in court in Melbourne this minute but it’s a game of “We can neither confirm or deny”. Patrick, a former senator and transparency warrior, kicks off his first column for Michael West Media today.
This post was originally published on Michael West.
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Books are being written about the Teal phenomenon. But at some point the media will have to put away their sense of excitement and examine it without the rose-coloured glasses.
This post was originally published on Michael West.
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This weekend, 227 Members and Senators will travel to Canberra from all corners of our continent to be sworn in on Tuesday to serve in the 47th Parliament of Australia since Federation in 1901. It will be led by the nation’s 31st Prime Minister, Anthony Albanese, who as the Leader of the Labor Party, follows …
Continue reading A NEW PARLIAMENT FOR AUSTRALIA
The post A NEW PARLIAMENT FOR AUSTRALIA appeared first on Everald Compton.
This post was originally published on My Articles – Everald Compton.
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Speculation surrounding Scott Morrison’s post-parliamentary ambitions includes the possibility of a job with the Australian Rugby League. His involvement with the sport poses plenty of questions, including the grants largesse that defined his time as PM.
This post was originally published on Michael West.
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The Andrews Labor government in Victoria and the Perrottet Coalition government in NSW are looking increasingly tarnished.
This post was originally published on Michael West.
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Australia is a different place politically, and so is Canberra. Scott Morrison is no longer a one-man employment agency, and ex-Coalition staffers are scrambling for new jobs.
This post was originally published on Michael West.
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When I was at school way back in the 1930’s, Sri Lanka was a colony that the British called Ceylon. Its role in the Empire was to keep us all supplied with top quality tea. They did that well. Significantly for Australia, it was a major stopover place for boats and planes making the then …
Continue reading CAN AUSTRALIA PARTNER SRI LANKA ON PATH TO RECOVERY?
The post CAN AUSTRALIA PARTNER SRI LANKA ON PATH TO RECOVERY? appeared first on Everald Compton.
This post was originally published on My Articles – Everald Compton.
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The appointment of a former NSW deputy premier over a more qualified candidate to a plum overseas posting is rightly being lashed. But the John Barilaro saga is just one example of the energetic outreach to the world by our state governments. Public good or puffed-up parochialism? Mark Sawyer examines the reach of the program.
This post was originally published on Michael West.
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On a night out, Manal al-Sharif was made to feel like a criminal by facial recognition. She walked away, wary of the surveillance state, and advises other Australians to do the same, every time.
This post was originally published on Michael West.
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It’s good news for one brave individual who exposed an egregious act of Australian spying, but protections for other whistleblowers remain inadequate, writes Callum Foote. Attorney-General Mark Dreyfus has ordered leaking charges against lawyer Bernard Collaery to be dropped. The lawyer and former ACT attorney-general faced charges for four years after he was accused of […]
This post was originally published on Michael West.
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Liz Truss has manoeuvred herself into top government jobs, but her past is full of embarrassing gaffes and dangerous politics
By The Canary
This post was originally published on The Canary.
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Labor’s high ambitions for the health system are under increasing strain.
This post was originally published on Michael West.
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After 9 years of Coalition rule, a Liberal stampede out of Parliament House means political and social upheaval in the nation’s capital. Out with the old political culture, in with the new. Stephanie Tran reports on the wave of political change.
This post was originally published on Michael West.
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During Donald Trump’s four year term as President of the United States of America, three vacancies occurred in the ranks of the nine Justices of the Supreme Court. He nominated three ultra conservative judges to replace them and made it clear to those judges that he expected them to remove the constitutional right of women …
The post USA SUPREME COURT DENIES WOMEN THE RIGHT OF ABORTION AND GIVES MEN YET ANOTHER PASS TO ‘GET OUT OF JAIL FREE’ appeared first on Everald Compton.
This post was originally published on My Articles – Everald Compton.
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In one of his last moves as a senator, Rex Patrick has advanced his battle against the National Archives to release important documents relating to John Howard and Alexander Downer’s undermining of Timor-Leste in the early 2000s. Callum Foote reports on the latest efforts to end the persecution and secret trials of whistleblower Bernard Collaery.
This post was originally published on Michael West.
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Some crossbenchers are warning, like the threatening mobster, that there’s some nice legislation there, wouldn’t it be a pity if something should happen to it.
This post was originally published on Michael West.
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Now is the time to end the dangerous threat to basic freedoms and the rule of law that the Julian Assange persecution represents. The Albanese government has a critical role to play to do everything in its power to stop the extradition and end his punishment, Greg Barns writes.
This post was originally published on Michael West.
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Listen to a reading of this article:
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They’ve lied about every war, and they’ve openly acknowledged lying about this very war, but you’re a Kremlin agent if you say they’re lying to us about this war.
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The mainstream worldview is self-evidently bullshit. If our media and education systems were telling us the truth about the world and our “democratic” systems actually worked, our society would be arranged to serve the interests of the many rather than an elite few.
You can tell the mainstream worldview is bullshit just by looking at its fruits. We’re killing our biosphere to serve an economic system that’s creating greater and greater inequality while wars rage and nuclear brinkmanship threatens to wipe us all out and corruption rules the earth.
The world is as it is because the way the majority of people in the most influential nations think, act and vote is being continuously manipulated by the powerful, for the powerful. The mainstream worldview is just a giant bundle of power-serving lies and manipulations.
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Remember when everyone who warned this exact thing would happen was called a Putin apologist https://t.co/Ni6nj0f54S
— Paul Gottinger (@PaulGottinger) June 15, 2022
The thing about the entirely predictable admission by Biden officials that sanctions are hurting ordinary Russians a lot more than they’re hurting the Kremlin is that the US empire is fine with that. The US empire doesn’t use sanctions to punish leaders, it uses them to foment unrest and hopefully spark a coup or civil war.
During an interview in 2019 then-Secretary of State Mike Pompeo effectively admitted that this is what the US empire uses sanctions for: not to influence the behavior of the government, but to coerce the people into ousting their government. State Department documents from 1960 show the US government discussing this exact same strategy regarding economic warfare against Cuba. This is a longstanding practice.
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Western liberal democracy is when corporations and bankers place all blame on the government, the government places all blame on the electorate, and the electorate absorbs all the consequences of the corporations, bankers and government without ever even getting a vote on any of the major decisions those entities make.
Ordinary citizens are assigned full responsibility for their social and financial struggles and their privacy rights are being eaten away. Powerful people are never held accountable for their immensely destructive decisions and they are protected by a wall of government secrecy.
Accountability and transparency should have a directly proportional relationship with power: the more power you have the more consequences you face for your actions, and the less privacy you’re entitled to. In our society it’s literally the exact opposite. It’s completely backwards.
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Just as western plutocrats and politicians want all the power and none of the responsibility, so too do their mouthpieces in the mainstream media. Highlighting their errors is harassment, criticizing them on social media is cyberbullying, calling out their sleaziness is Trumpian.
These people are broadly despised yet believe they’re doing a fantastic job. They insulate themselves in tightly cloistered self-validating echo chambers, so a member of the common riff raff tweeting harsh truths at them is experienced as an unexpected assault.
65% of journalists say news organizations do a very or somewhat good job reporting the news accurately. 35% of Americans agree, while 43% say journalists do a bad job of this. https://t.co/giX4QQlTfH pic.twitter.com/tky7MG5kRF
— Pew Research Center (@pewresearch) June 14, 2022
This class participates in an ongoing propaganda operation to manufacture consent for the status quo, and without them the world would look completely different. Their voices are orders of magnitude more powerful than ordinary people’s, yet they want no responsibility for this role.
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If I had the Thanos glove I wouldn’t use it to impose my personal ideology on the world, I’d use it to make all the secrets of the powerful visible to everyone and democratize information sharing so people could decide for themselves what course of action to take in response. All government secrets, all corporate and financial secrets, all the secrets of media institutions, would all be immediately visible and placed in front of everyone’s eyes. Then everyone gets a device with access to a global public forum to talk about everything they’ve learned.
I’d just let people see everything and then choose their own adventure. Maybe they’d choose to create the kind of egalitarian society I’d like to see, maybe they’d create something else. It’s up to them. All I did was end the subversion of their personal and collective sovereignty.
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In all the controversy about whether the US should be associating itself with a murderous tyrannical regime like Saudi Arabia please don’t forget that the US is far more murderous and tyrannical than Saudi Arabia by an extremely massive margin.
“Oh noes, Biden should be embarrassed to be seen with a tyrant like MBS!”
Bitch, MBS should be embarrassed to be seen with a tyrant like Joe Biden.
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Empire propagandists have exactly one analogy and exactly one argument. https://t.co/eLSrVqtuTQ
— Caitlin Johnstone ⏳ (@caitoz) June 15, 2022
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Conservatives will happily make kids pledge allegiance to flag and republic every day at school and sit in class learning about how they live in the greatest country on earth, then they’ll freak out about LGBT issues because “the children are being indoctrinated.”
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Mainstream western proponents of “democratic socialism” never call for an end to imperialism because they are fully aware that their version of “socialism” is entirely dependent upon imperialist domination and exploitation.
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People who believe humanity can make positive changes toward health and harmony tend to be people who’ve made such changes in their own lives. People who believe human nature is selfish and destructive tend to be selfish and destructive people. We’re just describing ourselves. We’re describing the insides of our own reality tunnels and then dressing it up as some grand knowledge about objective reality.
Really none of us know humanity’s fate, because our thinking about human potential and human nature is filtered through our personal experience of humanity from the inside. It is a mystery, and we can just let it be a mystery.
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My work is entirely reader-supported, so if you enjoyed this piece please consider sharing it around, following me on Facebook, Twitter, Soundcloud or YouTube, or throwing some money into my tip jar on Ko-fi, Patreon or Paypal. If you want to read more you can buy my books. The best way to make sure you see the stuff I publish is to subscribe to the mailing list for at my website or on Substack, which will get you an email notification for everything I publish. Everyone, racist platforms excluded, has my permission to republish, use or translate any part of this work (or anything else I’ve written) in any way they like free of charge. For more info on who I am, where I stand, and what I’m trying to do with this platform, click here. All works co-authored with my American husband Tim Foley.
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This post was originally published on Caitlin Johnstone.
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Labour MP for Brent Dawn Butler has revealed that House of Commons officials threatened her with police if she didn’t leave the building. This was after the speaker removed her from the chamber in 2021. Her treatment reflects the racist, misogynistic treatment of women of colour MPs at the heart of government.
Threatened with police
In July 2021, Butler told MPs that prime minister Boris Johnson had “lied to the House and the country over and over again” throughout the coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic.
Temporary deputy speaker Judith Cummins ordered Butler to leave the House of Commons after the MP refused to apologise for her comments.
In an interview that the BBC is due to air on Sunday 19 June, the MP told BBC 1Xtra‘s Richie Brave:
When I got thrown out, I thought that was it. I was going to get myself a drink in one of the many bars in parliament because I was a bit shaky.
She added:
And then I got approached and I was told I needed to leave parliament now, and they said ‘are you going to leave now or do we need to get the police to escort you off the premises?
This response from Commons officials reflects the widespread over-policing of Black people in Britain. Indeed, police in England and Wales are nine times more likely to stop and search Black people than their white counterparts. And they are over three times more likely to arrest Black people than their white counterparts.
Butler has experienced racist over-policing firsthand in the streets and in parliament. For example, Met Police allegedly racially profiled the MP and a friend in an August 2020 car stop. And according to Butler, a police officer once physically removed her from a tea room in parliament.
No support from Labour ‘comrades’
In the BBC interview, Butler added that fellow Labour members failed to support her following the incident.
Indeed, although Labour leader Keir Starmer agreed with Butler, stating that the prime minister is “the master of untruths and half-truths”, he also stated that the deputy speaker was right to eject the MP from the Commons.
Butler told the BBC:
People in my own party were ready to disown me […] because I broke Parliamentary rules. It’s like they didn’t feel proud of me that I was brave enough to call the prime minister a liar.
She added:
The people who I expected a phone call from to say ‘Dawn we’ve got your back’… no it didn’t happen. And I got a lot of abuse as well.
This speaks to the lack of support and antagonism that women of colour MPs face from within their own ranks. For example, it was a group of Labour MPs who started the hashtag #PrayForDiane to mock Britain’s first ever Black female MP Diane Abbott while she was ill.
Incidents such as this show that women of colour can’t even rely on the support of those who are supposed to be allies.
Racism and misogyny at the heart of British government
Butler’s experience reflects the routine racism and misogyny that women of colour MPs experience while carrying out their duties in parliament.
Indeed, a 2020 ITV investigation found that most MPs of colour have experienced racism during their time in parliament, with over half experiencing racism directly from other MPs.
For example, Labour MP for Hampstead and Kilburn Tulip Siddiq told ITV that someone advised her to run for parliament using her white husband’s surname because:
people wouldn’t vote for ‘Tulip Siddiq’.
And for years, Labour MP for Hackney North Diane Abbott has spoken out about the racist and misogynistic abuse she has experienced from online trolls and from fellow politicians.
Despite their widely documented lived experiences, no Black MPs were initially chosen to take part in an emergency House of Commons debate about racist online abuse. The Commons speaker only invited two Black MPs to take part in the debate after shadow secretary for women and equalities Marsha de Cordova expressed her ‘disappointment’ at having not been selected.
In December 2021, Tory MPs argued against proposals to introduce a new parliamentary behaviour code to protect members against racism and misogyny.
All this shows that parliament regards calling out the country’s elected leader for his consistent, dangerous lies to be a far greater crime than the racist and misogynistic treatment of marginalised MPs who stand for truth and justice.
This country needs more fearless, outspoken politicians like Dawn Butler to challenge the Tories’ discriminatory, fascist agenda and Labour’s politics of ‘sitting on the fence’. But as things stand, the next generation of potential MPs will be put off from entering the elitist, misogynistic and racist Houses of Parliament. Maintaining a hostile environment for those who would seek to represent people from minority communities only serves to marginalise them further.
Featured image via Ehimetalor Akhere Unuabona/Unsplash and Rwendland/Wikimedia Commons resized 770 x 403 px
This post was originally published on The Canary.
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The Albanese government is off to a flying start on foreign affairs, submarines, wages and human rights. But when it comes to former PM Scott Morrison’s promise to ship 70,000 tonnes of Aussie coal to Ukraine, is it a case of new boss just like the old boss? Callum Foote and Mark Sawyer investigates the mystery of the Whitehaven ghost ship and find a little problem of transparency.
This post was originally published on Michael West.
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The Platinum Jubilee of the longest reign in British History is over. Despite the physical frailty of the Queen denying her the ability to attend most of its premier events, it has been a memorable success and the British people appear to have enjoyed it immensely. Now, the monarchy will slowly fade away and in …
Continue reading BRIGHTLY FADES ELIZABETH
The post BRIGHTLY FADES ELIZABETH appeared first on Everald Compton.
This post was originally published on My Articles – Everald Compton.
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The people of Victoria and NSW should be celebrating this brisk winter night. The US investment house chasing control of Crown, purveyor of fine gaming establishments, is closer to taking control of the casino behemoth.
This post was originally published on Michael West.
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UK Home Secretary Priti Patel has to decide whether or not to sign off on Assange’s extradition to the US by the middle of this month. Anthony Albanese must act now to stop it.
This post was originally published on Michael West.
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The ALP has held the reins of government for less than a third of the time in Australia’s history. And the party seems doomed to get the call from the electorate just as trouble is brewing.
This post was originally published on Michael West.
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It is now time for Australians to vote in a Referendum that embeds the basic principles of the Uluru Statement into the Constitution of Australia. This historic milestone must not be delayed beyond this year and, as the Prime Minister has affirmed that his government is ready to pass legislation enabling the Referendum to be …
Continue reading ULURU REFERENDUM.
The post ULURU REFERENDUM. appeared first on Everald Compton.
This post was originally published on My Articles – Everald Compton.
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Rex Patrick has urged the new Attorney-General and Foreign Minister to heal relations with East Timor soured by Coalition governments
This post was originally published on Michael West.
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The shooting at a Texas primary school which resulted in the death of 19 children demonstrates the power of the US firearms lobby. The same forces are at work in Australia, reports Callum Foote.
This post was originally published on Michael West.
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Just before ousted Prime Minister Scott Morrison called the election, his Attorney-General Michaelia Cash stacked the Administrative Appeals Tribunal with a host of Liberal Party mates. Political appointments are out of control and the AAT needs to be killed off, writes Greg Barns SC.
This post was originally published on Michael West.
