Senior Defence officials “buried” an investigation into a major national security breach from the Brereton war crimes inquiry while pursuing whistleblower David McBride for the same crime. Stuart McCarthy with the story.

David McBride will know today if his appeal against his conviction for leaking classified material to ABC’s Four Corners ‘Killing Fields‘ program in 2020 will be successful, or if he has to continue to serve time for blowing the whistle on war crimes in Afghanistan.

We now know that McBride wasn’t the only one. During the war crimes inquiry, dozens of highly classified documents compromising Australian special forces operations in Afghanistan were leaked to Fairfax Media, but no disciplinary action was taken against the senior officers responsible for the leaks.

One of the officials involved in the investigation played a key role in planning the Rudd government’s expanded military commitment to Afghanistan ahead of the Obama administration’s 2009 troop surge at the height of the war.

MWM’s two-year investigation into Afghanistan command cover-ups revealed that a top-secret US spy plane flew a surveillance mission over Darwan village in 2012, where former SAS Corporal Ben Roberts-Smith allegedly directed the execution of elderly local man Ali Jan.

Who knew? High-level Afghanistan war crimes cover-up exposed

Passage of this and other classified imagery through the Australian command chain is considered key to any investigation into higher command responsibility on the part of Australia’s top generals, a matter that was referred to the International Criminal Court (ICC) by Tasmanian Senator Jacqui Lambie two years ago.

Under the ICC’s Rome Statute, commanders can be investigated as potential war criminals in circumstances where they knew or should have known crimes were occurring but failed to take action to prevent further crimes.

Defence Minister Richard Marles’ refusals to initiate criminal proceedings under Australian war crimes laws provided the legal trigger for Lambie’s referral.

Marles last year suppressed the final report of the Afghanistan Inquiry Independent Oversight Panel, which criticised Brereton’s exoneration of senior Australian commanders, for six months until the day McBride was sentenced to more than five years’ jail.

Richard Marles concealed war crimes report, denying justice for David McBride

Greens Spokesperson on defence and justice Senator David Shoebridge says, “We know from the independent oversight review that there was evidence linking Defence leadership to these war crimes when you looked. It’s impossible to believe that evidence wasn’t also available to Brereton.”

Classified images leaked

MWM can now reveal that dozens of highly classified images of various alleged war crime scenes taken by Royal Australian Air Force (RAAF) ‘Heron’ surveillance drones were leaked from the Brereton Inquiry to the media via the office of the Vice Chief of the Defence Force (VCDF) from as early as 2017.

Among the documents leaked to Fairfax were still images from full motion video (FMV) footage of the “Whiskey 108” compound in Kakarak village north of the Uruzgan provincial capital Tarin Kowt.

One of the most serious allegations made by Fairfax, recently upheld by the Federal Court, was that Roberts-Smith machine-gunned a disabled, elderly man after his patrol cleared the ‘Whiskey 108’ compound on 12 April 2009.

Some of the documents leaked to Fairfax were subsequently declassified and displayed as respondent exhibits in the Federal Court during the high-profile defamation proceedings with Ben Roberts-Smith.

The full extent of the classified leaks from the VCDF’s office remains unclear, but the documents obtained by Fairfax from the Defence Secret Network (DSN) include numerous still images from RAAF drone FMV footage, stills from other surveillance platforms, photos of weapons caches, SAS patrol reports, SAS operational messages, Special Operations Task Group (SOTG) operational summaries and printouts of the operations chatroom during two kill-capture missions against high-value Taliban targets.

The images have featured prominently in Fairfax and other media coverage of Roberts-Smith’s alleged war crimes at Kakarak in 2009 and subsequently at Darwan village in 2012.

Complaints about leaks

MWM can also reveal that at least three written complaints about the leaks from the VCDF’s office were made to Defence security officials from late 2017 to early 2018. Two of the complainants were senior Defence civilians, while a third was a senior Australian Defence Force (ADF) special forces officer. The unlawful disclosure of classified information is one of the criminal offences for which McBride was sentenced to more than five years’ jail last year.

Defence sources have informed MWM that the complaints led to an investigation headed by Celia Perkins, who was the head of the Defence Security and Vetting Service (DS&VS) at the time. Perkins’ high profile career included a posting to the Australian Embassy in Washington DC as a defence policy advisor from 2007 to 2010, a period that saw the Rudd government substantially increase Australia’s troop commitment to Afghanistan in 2009 ahead of the Obama administration’s “surge” of 30,000 extra troops to defeat the Taliban insurgency at the height of the war.

Prime Minister Kevin Rudd had privately agitated US President Barak Obama for an expanded international troop commitment to Afghanistan, suggesting ($) to US politicians in 2008 that French and German troops deployed to NATO’s International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) in Afghanistan were “organising folk-dancing festivals,” while the US, Canada, UK, Australia and the Dutch were “doing the hard stuff.” His commitment of an additional 450 Australian troops to Afghanistan in April 2009 preceded Obama’s “surge” announcement by nine months.

In 2010, Rudd’s cabinet colleague, Defence Minister Stephen Smith, personally approved the expansion of the SOTG’s role to include “out of province” raids in support of the US Drug Enforcement Administration’s drug war in Helmand province and elsewhere.

How Defence chiefs committed Australian special forces to the US drug war in Afghanistan

Perkins later served in the Office of National Assessments and as the head of Defence Strategic Policy, before assuming her current post as Deputy Secretary of Security and Estate. She did not respond to MWM’s query on the outcomes of the Defence’s investigation into the 2017-18 classified Brereton leaks.

Investigation buried

Defence sources now say the investigation was “buried” without explanation, somewhere in the bowels of the national security bureaucracy, despite the severity of the security breach. Similar leaks on the deployment of the secretive SAS 4 Squadron to East Africa in 2012, and Rudd’s proposed SAS commitment to NATO’s ousting of the Gaddafi regime in Libya, led to the outsourcing of much of the SAS regiment’s signals intelligence and related capabilities to Omni Executive.

A Defence counter-intelligence official who was briefed on the classified document leaks from the VCDF’s office in 2017-18 told MWM:

“We had received three statements from Defence employees, two civilian, one uniform, about potential deliberate leaks coming from ADF HQ … with a view as to whether it was an issue-motivated individual or some other undisclosed event. Curiously, the statements all implied the leaks were from the office of the VCDF.”

The VCDF at the time of the security breach was Vice Admiral Ray Griggs, who had previously served as Defence’s Deputy Chief of Joint Operations in 2010-11, placing him in the Australian operational command chain during the period covered by the Brereton report.

After his retirement from the military, Griggs replaced former Army Reserve Major General Kathryn Campbell (of later Robodebt infamy) as head of the Department of Social Services.

MWM does not allege any wrongdoing on the part of Griggs, and we have not been able to reach him for comment.

MWM can also reveal that months before the alleged war crimes involving Roberts-Smith at Sola and Darwan in August-September 2012, a RAAF intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance (ISR) specialist complained to a senior ADF commander in Afghanistan about the SAS patrol commander directing RAAF surveillance drones to the periphery of SOTG ground operations during the extraction phase, to avoid scrutiny of potential misconduct.

The officer ignored the complaint and allegedly chastised the complainant. MWM will not name the senior ADF commander for legal reasons.

One of Brereton’s controversial findings was that Australian commanders “did not have a sufficient degree of command and control” to attract criminal command responsibility for any of the 39 war crimes he identified in his report. Another finding was that there were “impediments” to SOTG squadron or company commanders using ISR platforms to detect misconduct, but he made

no mention of commanders’ control of ISR assets or their use of the resulting footage.

The ABC raid

Almost two years after Defence was alerted to the classified document leaks from the VCDF’s office, the department’s pursuit of the Afghan Files leaks by McBride led to an Australian Federal Police (AFP) raid at the ABC’s headquarters in Sydney.

The ABC’s coverage of the SOTG’s involvement in the controversial kill-capture campaign authorised via a “Joint Prioritised Effects List” (JPEL) target list approved by senior commanders, including Australian officers, goes as far back as the Four Corners ‘In Their Sights‘ documentary in September 2011. The program aired during General Angus Campbell’s tenure as commander of Australian forces in Afghanistan and the Middle East in 2011-12.

In October 2023, Senator Shoebridge asked Campbell, then Chief of the Defence Force, in Senate Estimates if he recalled being made aware of any war crimes allegations during this period. Campbell replied, “I don’t have an awareness now, 12 years later.”

Head of Defence Campbell said he does not remember responding to reports of war crimes when he was in charge of Joint Task Force 633 in 2011/12. pic.twitter.com/r7wxHYwr6s

— David Shoebridge (@DavidShoebridge) October 26, 2023

On Campbell’s retirement from the defence force last year, he was appointed as Australia’s Ambassador to NATO, Belgium and the European Union by the Albanese government. Shoebridge has been consistently scathing in his criticisms of Defence leadership and the government’s failures to protect whistleblowers: “Whistleblowers play an essential role in accountability, especially in matters of national security,

where the cult of secrecy in Canberra is so often used to protect failed leadership rather than the public interest.

Shoebridge says David McBride “is now in jail simply because he spoke the truth and blew the whistle on the culpability of Defence leadership.” The former military lawyer leaked documents to the ABC in an effort to expose wrongdoing by senior Defence officials in their handling of war crimes allegations, after his formal complaints through internal Defence channels and the AFP were ignored.

Pursuing the corporal, not the generals

This saga also raises serious questions about the legacy media’s unquestioning reliance on leaks and backgrounding from senior government officials. McBride initially contacted a Fairfax journalist without success, but was later contacted by ABC reporter Dan Oakes, who haphazardly covered the documents in the Afghan Files without the rigour or impact needed to meet McBride’s intent of holding Defence’s top generals to account.

Oakes admitted to Four Corners last year, “I rang David and I said, ‘Look I know the story you wanted told … I’ve decided that’s not the story.’”

While Fairfax and Nine have vigorously pursued junior-ranked SAS soldiers, including Roberts-Smith, over alleged war crimes, they have conspicuously avoided covering the question of the ADF leadership’s criminal command liability for the same killings. Under international law, command responsibility for war crimes is as serious as the crimes of murder allegedly committed by the junior SAS soldiers, a point still lost on Oakes and the rest of the legacy media.

Nine’s 60 Minutes program was one of the main platforms for the ADF generals’ long-debunked “we didn’t know” narrative around the Brereton report’s publication in 2020.

They didn’t know, really? Pursue top brass over alleged war crimes in Afghanistan, says veteran

By perpetuating this narrative and avoiding the command responsibility issue, what’s now clear is that Nine and the ABC have actively collaborated with a clique of senior officials who should themselves be under investigation for war crimes.

McBride’s concerns once again seem to have been vindicated, yet he’s the one in jail.

This post was originally published on Michael West.

After the South Australian Court of Appeal ruled that he had no protection under Commonwealth whistleblower laws, Richard Boyle has pleaded guilty to four charges as part of a plea deal. Rex Patrick reports from the Court.

The mood was sombre inside a crowded courtroom as Richard Boyle stood before South Australian District Court Judge Liesl Kudelka to timidly plead guilty to four criminal offences, with the expectation that he would at least avoid going to gaol for blowing the whistle on the ATO.

It was an act forced upon him after a court enforced realisation that he wasn’t protected by the whistleblower laws he thought did protect him, but he was wrong.

The making of a criminal … from a whistleblower

Blowing the whistle

In 2017, Richard blew the whistle on the ATO for inappropriately, indiscriminately, and carelessly issuing garnishee notices that brutally emptied businesses’ bank accounts of money to settle ATO debts.

During the Court of Appeal proceedings, the prosecutors conceded that Richard was a whistleblower as that term is commonly understood. He had disclosed information to an authorised person pursuant to the terms of the Public Interest Disclosure Act.

It was also accepted that his disclosure was not dealt with properly by the ATO. The ATO botched the investigation into his claims and did nothing.

That is, they did nothing until their inappropriate activity was the subject of an ABC Four Corners program (Note that there is no allegation that Richard disclosed taxpayer information to the ABC). In an act of revenge, the ATO charged Richard, not for blowing the whistle, but for what he did in preparing his disclosure, namely using his mobile phone to take photographs of taxpayer information, covertly recording conversations with ATO colleagues; and uploading photographs of taxpayer information to his lawyer’s encrypted email account.

The Court of Appeal found that those preparatory acts were not covered by protections in the Public Interest Disclosure Act and,

as such, he was not immune from prosecution.

An unsatisfactory plea deal

In mid-March, a deal was entered into with the Commonwealth Director of Public Prosecutions. If he pleaded guilty to four charges, they would discontinue prosecution of the remaining 15. He originally faced 66 charges, with 47 dropped before today’s arraignment.

And so it was that Richard pleaded guilty to four counts as follows:

• 1 count of making a record of protected information contrary to Schedule 1 of the Tax Administration Act 1953 (Cth). Maximum Penalty: 2 years imprisonment.
• 1 count of recording another person’s tax file number, contrary to the Tax Administration Act 1953 (Cth). Maximum Penalty: $21,000 fine, 2 years imprisonment or both.
• 1 count of Intentionally using a listening device to record a private conversation without the consent of the parties to that conversation contrary to the Listening and Surveillance Devices Act 1972 (SA): Maximum Penalty $10,000 or 2 years imprisonment.
• 1 count of disclosing protected information to another entity (his lawyer), contrary to Schedule 1 of the Tax Administration Act 1953 (Cth). Maximum Penalty: 2 years imprisonment.

It is understood that the Commonwealth Director of Public Prosecutions has agreed not to press for a custodial sentence, but will insist that a conviction is recorded. Richard’s position is that no conviction should be recorded.

Broken laws (almost) broke the man

A conviction should not be recorded. In the Court of Public Opinion, the almost unanimous view is that Richard has made Australia a better place. An investigation by the Inspector-General of Taxation that followed the airing of the ATO’s conduct by Four Corners found garnishee-related problem did arise in the office that Richard worked with,

and laws were changed to prevent that conduct being repeated.

Richard’s saga has also shown how broken the Commonwealth public servant whistleblower protection laws are.

One of the four objectives of the Public Interest Disclosure Act is to ensure that public officials and former public officials who make public interest disclosures are supported and protected from adverse consequences relating to the disclosures. Richard’s case has revealed failure in this objective.

Another of the four objectives is to ensure that disclosures by public officials and former public officials are properly investigated and dealt with. Another fail!

Those two failures led to the failure of the third objective, which is to promote the integrity and accountability of the Commonwealth public sector.

The only objective that has been met is the one that seeks to encourage and facilitate the making of public interest disclosures by public officials and former public officials. Richard was encouraged by the Act, which sucked him in eight years ago and has finally spat him out a broken man (he may not have been with us but for the support of his wife, Louise Beaston).

His story is one that should enliven support for reform of our federal whistleblower protection laws, including support for the Whistleblower Protection Authority Bill introduced in the last Parliament by Senator David Pocock and Lambie.

What’s next?

Sadly, the story for Richard is not over yet.

Richard still faces sentencing. While the prosecution has not sought a custodial sentence, it is ultimately up to Judge Kudelka whether or not he will walk from the court a free man at sentencing later in the year (submissions will be made in August with a final outcome shortly thereafter). However, it must be said that it is highly unlikely that the Court will seek a jail term in circumstances where the prosecutor doesn’t also seek that outcome.

Richard does still run the risk of having a conviction recorded against his name; something that could haunt him every time he makes a job application.

One hopes that this doesn’t happen, but if it does, those who are informed will understand that his conviction can only properly be worn as a badge of strength, much like the ‘S’ on a Superman costume, because Richard is a superhero.

Whistleblower persecutions. The cost of ignoring those who dare speak out.

This post was originally published on Michael West.

A new FOI reveals Kevin Rudd has been talking the AUKUS talk, with success. Yet no amount of talk will help the US walk the AUKUS walk. Rex Patrick on the project status.

A Freedom of Information request looking into what Ambassador Kevin Rudd and his Washington staffers had been doing on AUKUS since he took up his post in March 2023 shows that he was pretty busy.

When he arrived at his Embassy post, the US Congress had already passed the Australia-United States Submarine Officer Pipeline Act. That was the first US legislative action to support AUKUS, allowing Australian submarine officers to train with the US Navy, to gain expertise in nuclear-powered submarines and to set them up to serve on their subs.

But there was a lot more work to be done. The FOI shows that AUKUS was a priority that Rudd took on with his characteristic eagerness and focus. Between March and July 2023, he met with President Obama and over 40 members of Congress of both political persuasions, with a focus on those who were members of the Armed Services Committee or Foreign Relations/Affairs Committees.

In amongst tens of private or close-knit lunches, dinners and meetings, he also spoke at a House Foreign Affairs Committee roundtable on 18 April, had drinks with twelve Republican Members of Congress on 5 July and hosted an ‘AUKUS and US-AUS International Cooperation’ dinner at the Australian Embassy with seven Senators on July 11.

By then, the Embassy was declaring victory in cables back to Australia regarding AUKUS support in Congress.

Transfer legislation passes

Further Embassy work saw a swath of other laws change in support of AUKUS, including laws in the 2024 National Defense Authorization Act allowing for the conditional transfer in the 2030s of three Virginia-class submarines to the Royal Australian Navy.

The conditional elements of the law are that the transfer cannot take place if it would cause a degradation of US undersea capabilities or is inconsistent with US foreign policy and national security interests. Furthermore, the law requires the President to certify the US is making sufficient submarine production and maintenance investments to meet the combination of US and Australian requirements.

And therein lies the problem.

The US Congressional Research Service (CRS) estimates that, before a transfer of submarines can occur, the US Submarine Industrial Base needs to be producing one Columbia-class nuclear missile submarine and 2.3 Virginia-class attack submarines per annum.

Currently, the Columbia submarine program, the US Navy’s highest priority program, is running between 12 and 16 months behind schedule.

Virginia-class submarines are being built at a rate of 1.2 boats per annum, way below what’s required. At the same time, the number of commissioned US submarines either in depot maintenance or idle (awaiting depot maintenance) has increased from 11 boats (21% of the attack submarine force) to 16 boats (33% of the attack submarine force).

And that is why the Albanese Government has committed $4.7B to uplift the capabilities of the US Submarine Industrial Base. The US is also injecting billions, with a plan to get to a build rate of two Virginia-class submarines by 2028.

The big picture

The problem is that, when one stands back and looks at past US performance, even with the money being spent, hitting a build rate of 2.3 Virginia-class submarines a year is fanciful.

The Government Accounting Office (GAO) testified to the House of Representatives Armed Services Seapower and Projection Forces subcommittee on March 11 this year, stating,

The Navy has no more ships today than when it released its first 30-year shipbuilding plan in 2003.

This stagnation has occurred despite regular demands and plans for a substantial increase to the Navy’s fleet size and a near doubling of its shipbuilding budget (inflation-adjusted) over the past 2 decades.”

GAO described the situation in more detail stating that; in the 2000s attack submarines took six years to build and cost around $US3B, they now take nine years to build and cost around $US4.5B (only a third of the increase can be attributed to shipbuilding inflation); destroyers used to take five years and cost $US1.9B to build and now take nine years and cost $US2.5B (the lead ship of the new Constellation class frigate program has an estimated 3 years delay, with construction stalled; aircraft carriers used to take eight years to build and now take eleven years.

Over the period 2019 to 2040 it is estimated that the US Navy will have lost 234 ship service years due to shipbuilding delays and between 2027 and 2030 the US fleet will be smaller by 20 ships, mostly attack submarines.

Both the CRS and GAO have advised Congress that it’s not just a money problem; there are systemic issues right across the board.

The CRS testified that it has taken a long time to get into this situation and that it will take a long time to “right the ship”.

Studious Ambassador Rudd and his “big careful” AUKUS shipyard cost study

Talking cross-purposes

This brings us back to an exchange in the Australian Senate between the man in charge of AUKUS, Vice Admiral Mead, and Greens Senator David Shoebridge in June last year.

Shoebridge was asking what happens if the US can’t deliver; will we get our $4.7B back? Mead was answering that the US was fully committed. Shoebridge was in effect asking, ‘what happens if the US can’t walk the AUKUS walk’. Mead was answering, ‘they’re talking the AUKUS talk’.

Politics over engineering?

Over the years we’ve seen Australian politicians make promises about, and commit public money to, Defence projects that have subsequently gone off the rails and cost the country dearly in terms of money spent, unavailability of military capability and the undermining of national security.

It doesn’t matter what politicians in Australia or the US say; it matters what the experienced project managers and engineers say. In addition, our Defence is, at best, very short of experienced project managers; rather, they have flag-ranked officers who’ve never run projects but need somewhere to go after successfully commanding a ship or unit.

The warning signs for AUKUS are apparent right now. Australia is an island state that needs submarines and, based on the actual states of US shipyards,

the current trajectory of AUKUS is a likely loss of our submarine force altogether.

The Government recently announced that the Collins Life of Type Extension will be scaled back, and is refusing to develop a Plan B. Plan B is no submarines, after spending $4B not buying French submarines and pouring almost $5B into the US Submarine Industrial Base.

In any normal organisation which has accountability to shareholders, someone would have been fired by now. But no-one ever gets fired in upper echelons of the Defence force.

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

This post was originally published on Michael West.

A two-year MWM investigation reveals top Australian Army Generals may know much more about war crimes in Afghanistan than previously thought. Retired army officer Stuart McCarthy reports.

A US Air Force Liberty surveillance plane with top-secret signals intelligence (SIGINT) equipment flew a surveillance mission in support of an Australian special forces raid in Darwan, Uruzgan province, at the time of Ben Roberts-Smith’s alleged war crimes in September 2012.

The aircraft was part of a rapid procurement program that also saw Australian Defence Force (ADF) aircrews and intelligence operatives from other spy agencies attached to the US military intelligence task force conducting surveillance flights over Afghanistan at the height of the 20-year war.

Video imagery and other intelligence gathered by the US aircraft and Australian spies may prove crucial to a war crimes referral sent to the International Criminal Court (ICC) in The Hague two years ago, implicating some of Australia’s top generals.

Sad but simple explanations in veteran’s lost appeal

Surveillance flights

The Liberty is a heavily modified Hawker-Beechcraft Super King Air 350 (SKA 350) twin-engine turboprop aircraft, fitted with a suite of top-secret SIGINT equipment and a multi-spectral full motion video (FMV) camera.

Dozens of these unarmed aircraft were rushed into service in Afghanistan and Iraq by the Obama administration in 2009 to address delays in the production of armed ‘Reaper’ and ‘Predator’ drones. Similarly equipped civilian aircraft flown by ex-military crews were contracted to the same US-led task force, operating across the Middle East and North Africa. Publicly-released, high-resolution footage from Reapers and Predators striking suspected terrorist targets – or civilians – feature prominently in legacy media and online coverage of the Afghanistan and Iraq wars, NATO’s attacks on the Gaddafi regime in Libya in 2011 and the US military’s more recent involvement in Syria.

Liberty, Reaper and Predator share the same type of FMV camera, the L3Harris Wescam MX-15, also commonly fitted to helicopters and other fixed-wing aircraft used by law enforcement and search & rescue agencies across the globe.

The US-led ISR task force in Afghanistan collected 1,000 hours of FMV footage per day in 2012. A communications specialist assigned to the task force during this period told MWM the Kandahar detachment alone was conducting as many as 36 MC-12 or contracted SKA 350s flights each day, collecting around 140 hours of FMV footage and SIGINT data over a given target area.

An Australian intelligence operative who flew approximately 70 ISR missions on civilian SKA 350s fitted with the same camera and SIGINT equipment on contract to the US task force told MWM:

“There are quite a few ‘what-ifs’, but the MX-15 camera certainly had the ability to capture high-res video footage of potential war crimes taking place, if the operator was pointing in the right direction and zooming in on the right area. The question is – what edited footage was included in intelligence and operational reports up the Australian chain of command … and who has the full video files now?”

While much of the FMV footage from various ISR aircraft operating over Afghanistan and Iraq was declassified and made public during and after those wars, classified US military documents obtained by MWM show the FMV footage taken by the USAF MC-12s and contracted civilian aircraft was usually upgraded from “secret” to “top secret” – the highest level of security classification – whenever it was “fused” with additional top secret data such as the tracking of mobile phone transmissions from high-value targets or “persons of interest.”

Top secret SIGINT mobile phone tracking technologies were key to the success of the US-led coalition’s kill-capture missions against Al Qaeda and Taliban leaders through much of the war in Afghanistan and  Pakistan.

Five Eyes

The sharing of this type of highly classified material is part of the multilateral “Five Eyes” treaty between Australia, Canada, New Zealand, the UK and the US. In Australia and elsewhere, similar SIGINT and aerial surveillance capabilities have since been outsourced to government-funded private security companies such as Omni Executive, which employs ex-military personnel who retained their top secret security clearances after leaving the defence force.

The Liberty has a crew of four, including a pilot, co-pilot, ISR sensor operator and classified communications operator. In Afghanistan, a fifth member of the crew was usually located with the ground force tactical commander, providing live video footage and a secure communications link with the aircraft as it loitered over the target area.

Defence sources who were directly involved in the Australian Special Operations Task Group’s (SOTG) kill-capture campaign against the Taliban in southern Afghanistan told MWM the USAF Liberty was “the ISR platform of choice” for the SOTG during this period. The Liberty had a “lower signature” and was able to respond more quickly to calls for support than other aircraft such as the RAAF Orion. USAF MC-12s and contracted SKA 350s were based at Kandahar and Bagram airfields in Afghanistan, while the RAAF Orions were three hours away at Al Minhad Air Base near Dubai in the United Arab Emirates. One source told MWM:

“The ISR aircraft over Darwan was an MC-12, with the video feed going straight into the ops room and the forward command element out on the ground. If not an MC-12, it was one of the contracted SKA 350s.”

From 2009 to 2013, USAF says its Liberty squadrons played a key role in killing or capturing more than 700 high-value insurgent targets in Afghanistan, with a 99.9% response rate for ISR support requests from US and allied ground troops. The motto of the Bagram-based Liberty squadron was “Find, fix, finish.” One of the USAF Captains from this squadron said in early 2014:

“We use our tactical systems operator to help find the enemy. We then fix on the enemy with a camera operated by our sensor operator, and then we are part of the kill-chain as well; we guide other assets onto the target to be able to either eliminate or capture the enemy forces.”

Another Defence source who served in Afghanistan during this period told MWM:

“There were a few RAAF or ex-RAAF pilots attached to the Liberty units in Afghanistan. I can’t recall numbers, but I do know some of the Liberty ISR missions across Afghanistan were actually flown by  Australian pilots. Sigint specialists from ASIS [the Australian Secret Intelligence Service] and ASD [the Australian Signals Directorate] were also directly involved in the Liberty ISR task force to some extent.

There’s little doubt much of their ISR product would have gone to Canberra … regardless of the normal ADF or US military reporting chains.

The Darwan mission

Classified SOTG documents obtained by MWM show two Liberty aircraft were assigned to perform this role in support of the cordon and search mission at Darwan in Uruzgan province on 11 September 2012, where Ali Jan was allegedly executed. The raid involved 42 Australian soldiers from SAS 2 Squadron headquarters, SAS Golf Troop and 2 Commando Regiment’s November Platoon, with a “partner force” of 18 Afghan National Directorate of Security (NDS) ‘Wakunish’ commandos.

They were flown from the multi-national base at the Uruzgan provincial capital of Tarin Kowt (MNBTK) to the remote Darwan village just after 5.30 am in two ‘turns’ of four US Army UH-60 ‘Blackhawk’ utility helicopters.

Further support came from two US Army AH-64 ‘Apache’ gunship helicopters and one unmanned ISR drone, most likely a RAAF Heron. One of the Liberty aircraft circled above Darwan, providing live surveillance footage to the troops on the ground for the duration of the six-hour raid. The second Liberty remained on standby until it was stood down as ground operations concluded and the troops started returning to MNBTK on the Blackhawks. At 10.54 am, the SAS 2 Squadron operations officer wrote in the SOTG operations chat room:

“For ISR manager – limited value in the second [Liberty] mission this afternoon (for both [2 Squadron] and fusion and targeting cell). In order to conserve hours for a more viable targeting period, please stand down the second mission.”

As many as six “persons of interest” were detained by the SOTG during the Darwan search, then flown back to MNBTK and transferred to the ADF detention facility just before midday.

Defence sources have told MWM the tip-off for the raid came from corrupt, illiterate Afghan warlord Matiullah Khan, who at the time was the Uruzgan police chief. He was reportedly killed by a Taliban suicide bomber several years later in Afghanistan’s capital, Kabul.

Further details on the direct involvement of Australian pilots or SIGINT specialists in surveillance flights by USAF, ADF, other allied military or contracted ISR aircraft supporting the SOTG during this period are part of MWM’s ongoing investigation into higher command cover-ups.

The Office of the Special Investigator – the law enforcement agency established by the Morrison government to investigate the war crimes uncovered in the 2020 Brereton Report – responded to our query on whether they have accessed the relevant FMV footage or other SIGINT products during their investigations with, “The Office of the Special Investigator does not comment on operational matters.”

“We got him”

The Darwan raid was part of the SOTG’s pursuit of Sergeant Hekmatullah, a rogue ANA soldier who murdered Australian soldiers Sapper James Martin, Lance Corporal Stjepan Milosevic and Private Robert Poate and wounded two others in a so-called “green on blue” insider attack at Patrol Base Wahab north of Tarin Kowt on the night of 29 August 2012.

Capturing Hekmatullah became the SOTG’s highest priority, and they received extensive support from other Australian and allied military units and spy agencies. Announcing Hekmatullah’s eventual capture in Pakistan in October the following year, then Defence chief General David Hurley briefed a packed Canberra press conference on the involvement of ASIS, ASD and other Australian and international spy agencies in the broader operation.

One of the agencies included in Hurley’s long list of accolades was Pakistan’s Inter-Service Intelligence (ISI) – an organisation known to have

facilitated the provision of weapons, explosives, child suicide bombers, training, finances and other material support to the Taliban throughout the Afghanistan war.

Among the early raids in the SOTG’s pursuit of the rogue Afghan sergeant was a 31 August cordon and search at Sola on the eastern outskirts of Tarin Kowt, two days after the Australian soldiers were murdered.

According to then Defence Minister Stephen Smith, the Sola operation involved 60 SOTG personnel and 80 Afghan National Army (ANA) soldiers. The raid resulted in the deaths of two local civilians – 70-year old imam Haji Raz Mohammad and his 30-year old son Abdul Jalil. When Afghan President Hamid Karzai publicly complained about the killings, his complaint drew only a reflexive denial from Smith, who said in a press conference, “I’m advised by the Chief of the Defence Force [Hurley] that the two people who were killed have been confirmed as insurgents.”

According to Defence sources, the “confirmation” process consisted of SOTG officers having a discussion with police chief Khan, who routinely gifted expensive watches to incoming SOTG commanding officers, among other Australian officials. SMH columnist Peter Hartcher wrote of Karzai’s complaint about the killing of these two civilians who were “confirmed as insurgents” via the say-so of this corrupt Afghan warlord, “Hamid Karzai’s criticism of Australian troops on the weekend was an intolerable attack from an intolerable leader.”

Afghan Files

The eventual ADF investigation report into the Sola killings, summarised in the ABC’s ‘Afghan Files’ in 2017, found that Haji Raz Mohammad “was initially compliant, but then tried to grab [an] Australian’s weapon, so the Australian soldier shot him dead,” while Abdul Jalil was shot dead after being seen talking on a radio as helicopters approached to extract the Australians as the operation concluded.

The possibility that the Sola killings may be war crimes was first reported in the legacy media almost eight years later, by ABC Four Corners in March 2020. Three months after this story aired, Fairfax tried to introduce the ABC’s “fresh allegations” about Roberts-Smith’s conduct at Sola into the defamation proceedings, asking the Federal Court if it could change its defence to include the ABC’s reporting on the Sola incident and another October 2012 killing at Syahchow village in Uruzgan province.

Roberts-Smith’s barrister Bruce McClintock SC responded in court, “Fairfax have led no evidence about the source of the information now relied on – this is stark in relation to Sola.”

In June 2023, the 7.30 Report updated the ABC’s coverage of the Sola killings and the ensuing “diplomatic incident” between Karzai and Smith, now alleging the direct involvement of Roberts-Smith by name. The story was based on a leaked excerpt of the unredacted, classified Brereton report and an excerpt from a classified ADF investigation report that named Roberts-Smith but “found the shooting was justified because the imam was seen talking on a radio.”

Brereton Report

Despite the fact that Roberts-Smith’s direct involvement in two suspicious deaths and the victims’ identities were known by senior Defence officials and the minister almost immediately after the incident occurred, the Corporal remained on active duty even while a so-called “investigation” was underway. The Darwan raid that resulted in Ali Jan’s death took place 11 days later.

The heavily redacted Brereton Report found evidence of 39 murders of civilians by, or at the direction of, Australian special forces troops in Afghanistan from 2009 to 2013. Among Brereton’s other findings were that some SOTG soldiers used “throwdowns” of weapons or radios planted on the bodies of dead civilians, or falsely reported hostile behaviour by local Afghans, to conceal or justify murders or other crimes.

But some of these exact concerns were raised at least as early as March 2012, in an investigation conducted by an ADF officer in a senior International Security Assistance Force appointment. The officer wrote in his report that local concerns over civilian casualties at the time:

… may also require a review of the burdens of proof as they pertain to the necessity of engaging spotters perceived to be directly participating in hostilities.

The classified SOTG documents obtained by MWM covering the immediate reporting of Ali Jan’s death at Darwan suggest no such review was done. The elderly civilian was the fourth “enemy killed in action” (EKIA) reported by SOTG soldiers up through their tactical command chain during the Darwan raid, using the same apparent cover story.

At 2.37 pm, the SAS 2 Squadron operations officer entered a “post-debrief consolidation” of key events that took place during the morning’s cordon and search. The account provided to SOTG officers from the soldiers involved in the killing of Ali Jan was summarised:

“Whilst awaiting [helicopter] extraction [on the second turn of Blackhawks], an [SAS soldier] observed an individual moving through a thickly vegetated cornfield and utilising an Icom radio. The [SAS patrol] assessed that the individual was taking a direct part in hostile activity against [them] by reporting on [their] movements and that it was likely that the individual was manoeuvring between tactical weapons caches hidden in the thick vegetation in order to gain tactical advantage on [them] in order to undertake opportunistic small arms engagements of  [them] or approaching aircraft … The [patrol] assessed that they would not be able to apprehend the individual before he reached a potential weapons cache. A military working dog was not immediately available in order to effect detention.”

On this pretext, EKIA 4 was shot dead, destined to become part of Australia’s biggest ever defamation case a decade later.

Who has seen the footage?

Brereton found no criminal command responsibility on the part of senior ADF officers for any of the 39 murders he identified from 2009 to 2013, including this “EKIA” now understood to be Ali Jan. On the subject of aerial ISR assets potentially detecting criminal misconduct, Brereton’s heavily redacted report lists a number of “impediments” to commanders at company or squadron level, but no higher. The section detailing specific incidents, including the killings at Sola and Darwan, is entirely redacted.

Several sources involved in the Brereton inquiry have told MWM they believe video surveillance footage from aerial ISR platforms was used during the inquiry, but not shown to the suspects during the proceedings.

The inquiry was held under the administrative legal framework of the Inspector-General of the ADF, which does not afford witnesses or suspects the same legal rights to challenge evidence that are afforded in criminal proceedings.

The sequence of events between Sola and Darwan and its significance to the question of higher ADF criminal command responsibility have thus far been ignored by Fairfax, the ABC and the rest of the legacy media, despite their privileged access to repeated Brereton leaks from senior Defence officials.

They didn’t know, really? Pursue top brass over alleged war crimes in Afghanistan, says veteran

The passage of high-resolution ISR video footage from the USAF Liberty aircraft and other surveillance platforms involved in the hunt for Hekmatullah, up through the Australian operational command chain,

is now one of the keys to this command responsibility question.

Under the International Criminal Court’s  Rome Statute, military commanders or civilian superiors who knew or should have known crimes were being committed but failed to prevent further crimes, can themselves be prosecuted as war criminals. The respective war crimes provisions of the Australian Criminal Code, adopt a tougher “knew or was reckless” standard. The Albanese government’s failures to initiate criminal proceedings against ADF generals saw Senator Jacqui Lambie refer this to The Hague two years ago.

Did Australian generals or politicians know – or should they have known – war crimes were being committed by Australian special forces soldiers in Afghanistan? And what if any actions did they take to prevent further crimes? Were they reckless?

We will address these and other questions in Part Two.

Australia’s Afghanistan war crimes a serious challenge for Albanese government

This post was originally published on Michael West.

The Cayman Islands owner of Northern Beaches Hospital, Healthscope, has blown up financially and hospital ownership is set for a shakeup. Michael West dissects the NSW Auditor-General’s report on hospital performance.

The NSW Government had a bit of a brain explosion ten years ago when privatising the Northern Beaches Hospital (NBH) in Frenchs Forest. The usual spiel of efficiencies, cost control and how “everything is better in private hands.” And so it ended up controlled by a company in the tax haven of the Cayman Islands.

That may have been good for owner-operator (and tax-dodger) Healthscope, which is owned by private equity giant Brookfield, but perhaps not so good for patients and their insurers. In 2024, it emerged that NBH charged twice as much per bed per day as nearby (and public) Royal North Shore Hospital.

Heat is on to put Sydney’s privatised Cayman Islands hospital back in public hands

Eventually, these and other revelations led to the NSW Auditor-General investigating. The report came out last month, and we’ve read all 57 pages of it. But as the saying goes, a picture speaks a thousand words, or rather, a graph does.

The chart maps time spent in the emergency department (ED). You don’t even get that kind of volume on the Shanghai stock market! Kind of funny how at around the 4-hour mark, time in ED falls off a cliff.

Either one of two scenarios plays out here. Did 1000 hypochondriacs suddenly march out the door because the ED was too busy and they couldn’t get into triage? Or do the hospital operators massage the data to enhance their profits?

The AG report puts in more official, but no less damning language:

“The distribution analysis in Exhibit 9 shows a significant spike in the total time in emergency department just before the four-hour mark. This pattern is not consistent with results from similar hospitals in NSW .. This audit identified this anomaly and escalated it to Healthscope and the Northern Sydney Local Health District.

“The District is now investigating this pattern further.”

Don’t hold your breath for this intrepid investigation. The more likely situation is that public-private Partnerships (PPPS) like these have all manner of performance benchmarks, which affect the operator’s profits, and that 4-hour mark was likely one of those benchmarks.

Which brings us to the guts of our thesis: there is a massive conflict of interest between chasing profits and churning out patient care,

providing essential services should not be privatised.

Caymans Privatisation: Northern Beaches Hospital limps into financial triage

Auditor-General legal notices

The report by NSW Auditor-General Bola Oyetunji, Auditor-General for New South Wales, had come about after political pressure from the likes of Sophie Scamps, Jacqui Scruby and a host of others who’d been fielding complaints about NBH cost-cutting. It points out nine ‘legal notices’ which we assume means legal threats by the operator to the government, while the hospital operators claim:

there are too many sick people in this bloody hospital!

Okay, we are paraphrasing here, but they do say, “Healthscope has argued in the nine legal notices and in the request to hand back the public portion of the hospital that this has called into question the viability of the arrangement.”

They even picked up some healthy bonuses by complaining about it!

The report shows that the operator added some $143m in extra value last year—“$73 million in cash value to Healthscope and a further $70 million in reductions of liability.” In addition to the financial issues noted in the report, there were issues with safe staffing levels and service integration into the health network, and the regulator, the NSLHD, went easy on them.

“NSW Health agreed to Healthscope’s proposal to reduce the penalties attributable to poor performance, in part due to concerns about unintended consequences for patient safety.”

Hospitality performance is complicated – there is no visibility of any serious individual incidents, and we are not doctor, but the report says:

“The relatively limited analysis and monitoring of trends for minor harm or near-miss incidents present a risk that emerging trends are not identified and addressed. Additionally, Healthscope is unable to determine the extent to which factors such as insufficient staffing or equipment result in minor harm or near-miss incidents at the Northern Beaches Hospital.”

In summary, “Does not meet the performance expectations under the Deed.”

Too many sick people

Some of the other key areas of concern mentioned in Exhibit 10 of the report:

• Thrombolysis, not progressed (that’s medical jargon for strokes).
• Paediatric acute mental health beds declined.
• Interventional cardiology not provided in the public section, only private (that’s stents and stuff).

But the report nails what we have been hearing and writing about, “Exhibit 10 highlights tensions between commercial principles and public health service delivery.”

It appears that too many sick people complain every year!

To the extent that activity (sick people) exceeds the maximum payment amount, Healthscope essentially provides public hospital services for free. Healthscope has argued in the nine legal notices and in the request to hand back the public portion of the hospital that this has called into question the viability of the arrangement, in other words:

either give us less sick people or pay us more money.

The Northern Beaches Hospital has also experienced challenges in managing hospital-acquired pressure injuries, hospital-acquired infections and birth trauma during the review period for this audit.

A couple of other points of note:

• Exhibit 4: Revising the Northern Beaches Hospital falls action plan in response to an increasing prevalence of falls. In 2022, the Northern Beaches Hospital recorded poor performance on falls during care at the hospital, one of the 16 nationally agreed hospital-acquired complications.
• Under the terms of the project deed, Healthscope is not required to implement Safe Staffing Levels.

What’s next?

We have fielded many complaints about the hospital over the years, having exposed its financial arrangements; that it had been sold to a private equity mob and remanded to the Caribbean to be controlled by infamous tax dodgers, Brookfield.

Hospitals deal with life and death, so cost-cutting is critical to performance. The PPP deal, although very opaque, meant that Manly and Mona Vale Hospitals were shut to funnel traffic into the privatised new facility at Frenchs Forest.

Further, the state forked out $1.2B to enhance the road infrastructure and build the hospital, then gave it to Healthscope on a $1 a year lease for 30 years. But still, the operator gets paid a couple of hundred million a year to run the public portion, besides other revenue sources.

The Boys from Bermuda dud government again on hospitals

And although the report did not get to the bottom of it, suggesting that on a financial efficiency basis it was comparable with other hospitals, on the publicly available information. However, we had a look at comparable figures and it appeared – from public data – that Royal North Shore was three times cheaper per public bed than NBH. We don’t know this for sure, as these deals, and this is a problem with them, are not transparent.

Which brings us to the speculation that as they don’t have to disclose terms, the NSW Government may have had them over a barrel on serious health incidents under the Deed and has said, “well, you guys can walk away without suing us and forcing this to be disclosed in a courtroom if you try to get your lawyers to pressure us for a massive payment to take the thing public again.”

Again, we don’t know.

But just one more moral of this story. This is a good report, and that’s because it was done by the Auditor-General. If you look at the track record of governments, particularly federal governments, over recent years, privatisation has meant the government will pay EY, PwC, or any one of these consultants hundreds of thousands, if not millions, to do this paperwork to achieve whatever result they want. The old “give us your watch, and we’ll tell you the time routine.”

This report is a breath of fresh air.

The Hospital with too many Sick People | The West Report

 

 

 

This post was originally published on Michael West.

Our top civil servants are being paid exceptionally well by international standards and much more than our Prime Minister, let alone the ministers to whom they are answerable. Time for change, Rex Patrick says.

When I first tweeted about departmental secretaries’ salaries back in late 2023, the tweet had 450,000 views, and it prompted News Corp to run a piece right around the country entitled “Million dollar club”.

Scrutiny of these top cat bureaucrats’ salaries over the past two years, and articles by this and other news outlets, led to a Bill being introduced in the Senate – the Remuneration Tribunal Amendment (There for public service, not profit) Bill. The purpose of the Bill is to put an end to the culture of obscene entitlement at the top of the Commonwealth bureaucracy.

“It’s complicated” is the typical answer by those defending the high salaries. But is it?

Fat cats

Secretary position	2024	2025	Increase
Prime Minister & Cabinet	977,200	1,011,410	34,210
Treasury	952,770	986,120	33,350
Attorney-General’s	928,340	960,840	32,500
Defence	928,340	960,840	32,500
Social Services	928,340	960,840	32,500

Current Secretary Salaries (Source: Remuneration Tribunal)

 

The head of the Department of the Prime Minister and Cabinet gets over $1 million a year and the Secretaries of the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade, Defence and Home Affairs are not far behind at $960,000. In fact, there’s only two departmental heads earning less than $900,000. All earn significantly more than our Prime Minister, who is on $608,000.

These are extremely generous salaries and entitlements by international standards.

US Government departmental secretaries, who head up much larger agencies with much bigger budgets, under US law, get less than half those salaries. They are limited to US$250,000 or around $403,000.

The Bill that is currently before Parliament seeks to limit the salaries of these public officials, which you pay, to that of the Federal Treasurer.

Remuneration Tribunal

The first point of argument to retain these huge salaries is that they’re set by an independent remuneration tribunal.

But the fact of the matter is that the Remuneration Tribunal operates in secrecy, and so far as any outside observer sees, they wander into a room, add a consumer price index number to last year, then leave the room.

The Community and Public Sector Union (CPSU), which represents federal public sector workers, states that the tribunal’s determinations are “often succinct with limited detail” compared to the determinations made by the Fair Work Commission for the Annual Wage Review. After publishing its research, seeking public input, and holding public hearings, the Fair Work Commission produces a highly detailed report explaining its decision.

The CPSU argues that,

the decisions of the Remuneration Tribunal rarely have any connection with broader public sector wage policy.

The CPSU points out that right across the top of the public service, the Senior Executive Service enjoys successive wage increases that substantially outpace those of everyday public servants. The gap between those at the top of the bureaucratic tree and those on the branches below has steadily grown.

Market folly

The second claim made in defence of million-dollar salaries is that secretaries must be paid in line with the broader business leadership market in Australia. But that is a highly questionable proposition.

Almost all secretaries are selected from within the public service. They are chosen from a Senior Executive Service made up of officers who have carefully and cautiously climbed the public service ladder, bobbing their heads and adjusting their views to suit the government of the day.

There is no real competition when it comes to the selection of secretaries.

Another area of difference with the public sector is the nature of the job. All CEO’s must have skills in the generation of income and make careful choices on how to spend that income to achieve a company’s current and future objectives, all whilst returning a profit.

Secretaries know little about generating money. Their money simply arrives on their doorstep every May in the form of a budget. Sure, there are fights within government for a share of the budget pie, but that’s at the margins, and the ultimate responsibility rests with Ministers in Cabinet, or rather, the select few of the Expenditure Review Committee.  And, at the end of the day, there is often very little feedback between money spent and whether current objectives are achieved.

There is absolutely no evidence available to suggest any problem recruiting well qualified, experienced and capable departmental secretaries at a more realistic and modest salary. Most public servants enter the service to do good. Sitting at the top of a very good bunch of people involves power, prestige and plenty of perks such as regular air travel coupled at the front of the aircraft with a complimentary QANTAS Chairman’s Lounge membership.

Public largesse or market necessity? Jacqui Lambie’s Bill targetting fat cat salaries

Accountability vacuum

Unlike CEOs in the private sector, secretaries can get away with poor performance and retain their golden salaries. As we’ve seen recently, it takes a Royal Commission to end a secretary’s career (e.g., Kathryn ‘Robodebt’ Campbell) or exposure of serious misconduct (Mike Pezzullo).

Perfunctory performance does not result in harm or dismissal.

Nowhere more prominent is this accountability vacuum that in Defence, where consistent mismanagement results in consistent project failures … and promotion follows.

No one gets sacked for being a dud.

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

What loss of tenure?

Andrew Podger, Honorary Professor of Public Policy at the Australian National University, reminded everyone in his submission to the Senate Committee that there is a 20% loading built into a secretary’s salary to compensate them for the loss of tenure that occurred when a contract system was brought in in 1991.

How out of touch is that sort of loading? Who exactly gets one of those?

Secretaries have an amazing redundancy package. The Tribunal, inexplicably, nominates compensation in their determination “for a termination 12 months or more before the end of the Secretary’s term of appointment—12 months’ reference salary at the time of termination”. A million-dollar payout for loss of job!

In their approach to setting such high salaries, the Tribunal thinks that secretaries have a high market rate, but then grant them a redundancy that assumes they’ll struggle to get a job in the event of termination.

Action required

This writer was recently at a social function at Parliament House and leaned over to mention the Bill to a senior Cabinet Minister. The Minister responded, “I agree that secretaries are paid too much, but what do we do about it”.

“Pass the Bill” was my response.

As regular Australians struggle with the cost of living, secretaries swivel at the top of a greasy bureaucratic pole, far removed from the daily lives of the vast majority of Australians. There’s no cost-of-living crisis for them.

How can any of them appreciate the struggles of the average Aussie family when they are rolling in taxpayer-funded cash? Less than 1% of Australians earn more than $350,000 a year, and they’re all members of that club.

It’s this vast gap of experience and understanding that spawned Robodebt and let that scandal grow for years without action.

No public servant should be earning more than our Prime Minister or Treasurer, who both bear huge responsibilities and can suffer from limited tenure when the electorate, or their political colleagues, turn on them.

Even when comparing apples and apples, our departmental secretaries get paid far too much. The US Secretary of Defence runs a department with a larger annual budget than the entire Australian Government; he gets less than half the salary of our Defence Department secretary.

Let’s hope the Finance and Public Administration Committee examines some of the arguments raised and recommends the Bill be passed. There are also some other useful suggestions made in submissions to the inquiry in the event that Senators on the committee don’t have the ticker to remedy the renumeration scandal that’s at the top of the Federal bureaucracy.

Action is needed, and a failure to address this festering issue would be an insult to the millions of hard-working Aussies who pay these senior public servants so much.

Senior public servant gravy train: all profit and no accountability

This post was originally published on Michael West.

With Elizabeth Watson-Brown retaining her seat in Ryan (QLD), the Greens are down to a single rep in the lower house, losing three, including party leader Adam Bandt. Part Two of the election analysis by Stuart McCarthy.

In part one, we set the scene for the LNP’s unravelling as “the party that stands for nothing” in the eyes of conservative voters in south-east Queensland. As the tally drags into its second week to decide a handful of remaining seats, we now drill into some of the peculiarities in Ryan.

These include the mishandling of the “veterans’ vote” with vacuous flag-waving, and the return of the LNP’s prodigal son from three years in the wilderness with industry-funded astroturfing. Julian Simmonds, who in 2022 took Ryan from LNP “blue ribbon” seat to greenslide ground-zero in a single term, came back for a second crack at destroying his party’s prospects for re-election in 2025.

Having abandoned classical liberalism with its interventionist nuclear energy proposals on the national stage, in Ryan the LNP and their NewsCorp cronies chose to wage an ideological war for the hearts and minds of voters over The Greens’ support for Palestine, disrespect for the Australian War Memorial (AWM) and the national flag, in a cynical ploy to invoke the veterans’ vote.

The LNP’s nuclear policy is working just fine

After the AWM was vandalised by a pro-Palestine protester in June last year, the Greens opposed parliamentary motions to condemn the vandals. The controversy escalated when Greens Senator Jordon Steele-John described the vandalism as legitimate acts of free speech. The alleged vandal has since been arrested and charged with five counts of damaging property. Many veterans, this author included, wrote to Greens Senators or MPs to raise their concerns.

Veterans attack

In February, Courier-Mail columnist Des Houghton published a story about a letter sent to Watson-Brown by a group of veterans, including Victoria Cross recipient Dan Kieghran, and Watson-Brown’s unsatisfactory response. Houghton then appeared on Sky News with some “analysis”, taking issue with an “unrepentant” Watson-Brown’s “decision to besmirch the flag.” Another obviously self-generated NewsCorp stitch-up story, from a columnist clueless to the real stories affecting this constituency.

Houghton’s role in unhinging the LNP in Ryan, a seat he identified as a “must-win”, is a salient lesson on the risks of entrapment in the Sky News echo chamber. Had LNP candidate Maggie Forrest picked up the ball dropped by Labor in government after the Defence and Veteran Suicide Royal Commission, for example, she would likely have kicked some big goals in this electorate. But she dropped the ball and took Houghton’s ideological bait instead.

“Band-Aid Bill”: expert advice ignored in tepid response to Suicide Royal Commission

Ten days after Houghton’s story went to print, Forrest appeared on Sky After Dark with Paul Murray, claiming:

“Ryan is home to thousands of people who feel the same , it’s home to thousands of Defence families, with Enoggera Barracks at its heart, yet ee’ve got a Greens MP who refuses to fly the Australian flag. She hates the flag so much, she won’t fly it in her office. She disrespects all those people in Ryan who are proud of our country and our flag, and in particular our Defence service men and women.”

The Forrest factor

Forrest is a barrister who, amongst other things, worked for the Office of the Prosecutor at the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia in The Hague.

She has said nothing on Labor’s persecution of military whistleblower David McBride for attempting to expose senior defence force officers for scapegoating junior soldiers to avoid command responsibility for alleged war crimes in Afghanistan, nor has she said a word on the referral of a former Labor Defence Minister to the International Criminal Court Prosecutor over the same matter.

Unlike her legal colleague and People First candidate Kathryn Chadwick, she has been silent on the “catastrophic failure of leadership at a government level and within the military” uncovered by the DVSRC that precipitated a suicide epidemic among some of her core constituents, and silent on the Turnbull Government pouring $1 billion down the drain on a window-dressing exercise aimed at forestalling that same Royal Commission.

Paid to Not Reform: Veterans’ Affairs chucks $73m at PwC to dodge Royal Commission

She stood on the sidelines earlier this year as Labor rushed band-aid measures through parliament, likely to perpetuate those catastrophic failures for another generation of her constituents, legislation which her LNP parliamentary colleagues waved through in unanimity.

On these burning issues affecting the lives and well-being of Ryan’s defence and veteran families, Forrest proved as lazy and ill-informed as Shadow Defence Personnel and Veterans’ Affairs Minister Barnaby Joyce. Joyce has been so invisible in his portfolio for the past three years, few voters even know he has held that portfolio.

Pork-barelling

Silent on the core issues and bereft of relevant policies from her party’s national leadership, Forrest’s local campaign announcements in Ryan instead bore all the hallmarks of a ‘Sports Rorts II’ pork-barelling scheme, right down to a cameo appearance by the architect of Sports Rorts I, Bridget McKenzie.

The verdict on all this was once again made clear on polling day. The defence and veteran voters who held themselves back in reserve from round 1 of the LNP’s 2022 belting in Ryan took out their baseball bats for round 2. The polling booths around Enoggera Barracks saw swings against Forrest ranging from 4.7% to 9.3%, another repudiation of the LNP’s distasteful recipe of flag-waving and hollow national security posturing.

Part of the #Ausvotes2025 bloodbath for the LNP in south-east Queensland last Saturday: results for LNP candidate Maggie Forrest at the booths around Enoggera Barracks, one of the largest defence force bases in Australiahttps://t.co/qbwu3EMJMB pic.twitter.com/cCKTzSEF9F

— Stuart McCarthy (@StuartMcCarthy_) May 7, 2025

Among these informed voters, the LNP’s national security credentials are as thin as the sailcloth of the flag they pulled out for their desperate crusade against the wrong election target.

But to understand the full extent of the LNP’s incompetence, we need to go back a few years to examine the toxic influence of Julian Simmonds, the Scott Morrison acolyte who lost Ryan to Watson-Brown in 2022 in a spectacular 8.7% two-party-preferred swing from his party.

The Simmonds factor

Julian Simmonds was an accident waiting to happen for the LNP, a party with a poor reputation over its treatment of women.

In 2018, he ousted Jane Prentice in a pre-selection battle for the seat amid allegations of branch stacking. The well-regarded Prentice was Assistant Minister for Disability Services in the Turnbull government. LNP colleagues, including Michelle Landry, threatened to quit the party in protest. Courier-Mail columnist Margaret Wenham later wrote of Simmonds:

“If ever there was an elephant in the room amid the Liberal Party’s struggles with female MPs and candidates, it’s this candidate for a federal seat in Brisbane. But unless voters express their displeasure, nothing will change.”

Several months after Prentice’s ousting, senior party officials also told the Courier-Mail they feared “a state-wide stack of Christian soldiers sparked by long-held grievances over the axing of Tony Abbott and last month’s abortion bill.” The events coincided with the federal Coalition leadership spill that saw Scott Morrison replace Malcolm Turnbull as Prime Minister.

Simmonds’ single term as Member for Ryan under Morrison coincided with the ignominious end to the war in Afghanistan, a conflict in which literally thousands of troops from Enoggera participated on a continual basis for two decades, many remaining in the electorate as civilians after their military service concluded.

These men and women looked on in dismay at the Morrison government’s incompetent abandonment of locally employed Afghans unfolding on their TV screens less than a year before the 2022 election. They read NewsCorp attack pieces clearly orchestrated by senior LNP politicians defaming well-known veteran advocates as Taliban sympathisers or medal cheats. 

Then, in the 2022 election, they read Simmonds’ campaign advertising repeatedly misrepresenting personal correspondence from vulnerable veterans and other constituents as political endorsements for his re-election.

Simmonds might have flown under the radar in 2019, but voters took to him with the proverbial baseball bat at the polling booth in 2022. Local women and veterans helped deliver a 10.1% primary vote swing against the LNP that saw Simmonds resoundingly booted out of Ryan as a one-term wonder.

Not content with prematurely ending the career of the popular female minister who preceded him and throwing away the seat for the first time in history through a lack of personal integrity, this year he set about further poisoning the LNP’s moribund brand by rolling out similarly deceitful methods but on a grander scale.

Australians for Prosperity

Simmonds is, or was, the chief executive of the astroturfed third-party Australians for Prosperity (A4P). With $725,000 in donations from the coal industry, earlier this year, the group posted advertisements critical of Greens, Labor, and Teal independents’ policies on Instagram and Facebook. Most of them included vox-pop-style interviews with locals from key seats held by MPs from those parties.

Several A4P’s vox-pop interviewees told the ABC last month that although they consented to having the videos posted on social media, they weren’t told they would feature in political advertisements for A4P. A number of the videos were pulled when the Australian Electoral Commission (AEC) approached the group over unauthorised content, involving potential breaches of electoral laws.

Not only did voters respond to the advertising blitz by A4P and other right-wing astroturf groups with indifference or disdain, there was a backlash, particularly among female voters fed up with political deceit and negativity. Greens and Labor campaign officials told MWM anecdotes of otherwise moderate constituents who responded to the advertisements by offering to support either party by donating or volunteering.

Needing a primary vote in the 40s, Forrest bowed out on Wednesday last week on 36%. Around the same time of her concession to “whoever wins” reduced the field to the Greens and Labor candidates, Labor’s Rebecca Hack told MWM:

This result is a message that Australia is a country that believes in kindness; in lifting up, not tearing down; in building, not blocking.

LNP soul-searching

As the Coalition’s recriminations over these disastrous results began last Monday, the LNP’s recently elected Queensland Premier David Crisafulli offered a little more self-reflection, saying his party has “some soul searching to do.”

That soul-searching process must surely examine Simmonds’ role in the bloodbath.

Crisafulli might also want to have a chat with his Treasurer Jarrod Bleiji, who appointed Simmonds to acting chief executive of Economic Development Queensland (EDQ) just before the Easter long weekend, without advertising the position.

EDQ is directly involved in delivering infrastructure for the 2032 Brisbane Olympic Games, including the $3.5 billion athletes village. The international media pack already sniffing for the next big Olympic Games infrastructure corruption scandal might give Crisafulli some food for thought here. Citius, Altius, Fortius.

Greenslide to fratricide: how the LNP shot themselves in the foot in Queensland

 

This post was originally published on Michael West.

One of the Albanese government’s oddest ventures was joining with Queensland to bet $1 billion on a roughy running in the quantum computing stakes. Michael Pascoe wonders if it could be scratched.

All governments have the occasional rush of blood to the head and pour serious money into dubious projects. AUKUS is the biggest example, but not the only one. In March 2024, Ed Husic convinced the Cabinet to partner with Steven Miles’ Queensland Government in making a long-odds $1 billion bet on PsiQuantum, a little Californian company that keeps claiming it will be the first to build a “utility-scale fault-tolerant” quantum computer.

It is a very strange “investment” made in very strange circumstances in a very strange race.

So far, PsiQuantum’s greatest achievement seems to be extracting money from various governments, with the UK, Illinois, Queensland and Australian taxpayers all chipping in, but none at our scale.

The UK is only risking ($) $17 million on PsiQuantum, thinking it wiser to diversify its bets on the many outfits trying to make quantum computing work. For that sort of money, PsiQuantum is setting up an R&D facility in Warrington.

A really big computer somewhere

For our billion (rounding up from the official $940m), the company has promised to build the very first useful quantum computer in Brisbane at a 100,000 square metre site that’s supposed to be operational by the end of 2027.

But as announced a couple of months after the Down Under deal, PsiQuantum also is promising the first US-based such machine for Chicago’s south side where it is to build a 28,000-square metre “Quantum Computer Operations Centre”, courtesy of US$500m in government incentives.

A senior Chicago-based computer scientist of my acquaintance is scathingly sceptical, and a year after the Brisbane announcement, it looks like the project is already slipping behind schedule.

Besides, with Steven Miles gone, Queensland’s LNP government is reconsidering its commitment. And if Canberra gets cold feet without Ed Husic as the minister pushing his baby, it may not be too late to get out without loss, maybe even at a profit.

In March, PsiQuantum raised US$750m from investors in a transaction that reportedly values the company at US$6B. The AFR reported the Australian bet was at a significantly lower valuation, but there’s no detail of exactly what, nor of the amount of equity involved or what proportion of the loans may be converted into equity, if any.

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

Great in theory, but…

PsiQuantum is just one relatively small runner in the crowded quantum race against government and industry giants. It is pushing a different theory to solve the many problems of quantum computing, but it remains a theory.

You wouldn’t guess that from the way PsiQuantum promotes itself. According to the company, it is a sure thing that by 2029 in Brisbane, “PsiQuantum’s first utility-scale system will be in the regime of 1 million physical qubits and hyperscale in footprint with a modular architecture that’s able to leverage existing cryogenic cooling technologies”.

It is not impossible for this dream to come true, but the odds are not good.

As I wrote last year in another place, I’ve been around for a while. In an earlier life I edited a computer magazine in Hong Kong. My first job upon returning to Australia was the IT round for the AFR. I’ve heard lots of promises and spin over the decades. When I hear a CEO make those sorts of promises, I think of Sir Humphrey and “very brave, Minister”.

Still, there are stranger things than the idea of Brisbane quickly developing the necessary workforce and superconductivity skills for quickly building the world’s first big fault-tolerant, commercially viable quantum computer.

There’s the idea of Adelaide building massive, as-yet-undesigned-by-a-committee nuclear-powered submarines.

After throwing Dreyfus and Husic under the right faction bus, Richard Marles is even more firmly ensconced to push his submarine dream, but what new industry minister would want to tie his or her star to a wild bet made by their predecessor?

Axed minister’s angry response to ‘factional assassin’

 

This post was originally published on Michael West.

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.