The Australian Submarine Agency deals with high-level Defence secrets and fissile material, yet it has been caught ignoring security obligations while threatening Rex Patrick, who reports on their conduct.

Last Friday, government solicitors acting for the Australian Submarine Agency sent me a warning against publishing some embarrassing information about their conduct.

Neither I nor MWM will be subject to their bullying, however.

Nuclear fuel waste

The Australian Government has undertaken to accept responsibility for the spent nuclear fuel from our planned AUKUS submarines. This is no light undertaking. It’s more than a lifetime obligation; indeed,

it’s an obligation that will last tens of thousands of years.

The Government has announced that this high-level radioactive waste will be stored on Defence land.

As reported by MWM, in February 2023, the Australian Submarine Agency awarded a contract for nearly $400K to former Defence Department Deputy Secretary Steve Grzeskowiak to find a suitable Defence location.

The very expensive irony that lurked behind this contract was the fact that Grzeskowiak had, when he was inside Defence, looked for a location on Defence land to store low-level radioactive waste and had been unable to find a suitable site.

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

According to Grzeskowiak, there wasn’t a single spot anywhere across the vast Defence estate that was suitable for storing low-level radioactive material. Yet he was now the go-to person who would, through some miraculous divination, find the Australian Submarine Agency a location across the very same territory

where it would be safe to dump a pile of the highest level, most radioactive nuclear waste.

Go figure.

Document request

In December 2023, I requested Mr Grzeskowiak’s report under our Freedom of Information laws. I was refused access on the basis the report was a Cabinet document.

But here’s the interesting thing. I knew that the report had been being worked on by multiple agencies, so I requested related documents from the Australian Nuclear Science and Technology Organisation (ANSTO), the Australian Radiation Protection and Nuclear Safety Agency (ARPANSA), Geoscience Australia (GA), the Department of Industry, Science and Resources (DISR) and the Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet (PM&C).

What those documents showed me was the report was not, at least until after I made my FOI request, developed on the Government’s CabNet+ system.

I’m now in a legal fight at the Administrative Review Tribunal, pressing my case for the report to be made public.

CabNet rules

The Cabinet Handbook, the bible for Cabinet’s processes, makes it crystal clear that cabinet documents must be prepared on a special CabNet+ system.

The protective security framework of the Government also commands that Cabinet documents are stored on CabNet+.

Despite this, the Australian Submarine Agency didn’t do that.

Why? I can’t publish their evidence in the proceeding until the matter has been heard in the Tribunal, but what I can say is that it’s a case of reckless indifference to the rules.

It begs the question, will the Australian Submarine Agency also play fast and loose with the rules in relation to our highly classified data or our allies’ highly classified data?

The Australian Submarine Agency is under a great deal of pressure to “get the job done”.

There are unquestionably a lot of unrealistic expectations coming down from the top. Will they follow the rules when it comes to nuclear safety, or will they bend and break the rules when they find it expedient to meet a politically driven objective?

Legal arguments

In their legal submissions, the Australian Government asserts: “The fact that the document was not created within the ‘CabNet’ system is not indicative one way or the other as to the intention of the authors.”

Actually, the rules of Cabinet are very strict. A document must meet two tests to qualify as a cabinet document 1) it must have been bought into existence for the dominant purpose of submission for consideration by the Cabinet, and 2) it must have been submitted to Cabinet.

I am satisfied it meets the second test but not the first.

To meet the first test the Government has to present objective evidence to the Tribunal that a minister so commissioned the document for consideration by Cabinet.

They have not done so.

And the fact that the document, in breach of the rules,  just floated around on a government network not authorised to hold Cabinet documents for months on end will work against the Australian Submarine Agency in the end.

Hypocrisy

In response to insistence from Prime Minister Anthony Albanese that Peter Dutton should disclose the intended location of seven nuclear power stations, the Opposition Leader did so.

But Albanese is refusing to be transparent about the intended location of a high-level radioactive waste dump. His government wants to block public debate for as long as possible and then present people with a fait accompli.

It’s yet to be seen whether the Government will win on its claim that the report I’m after is a Cabinet document. But in the end, if it were determined that the report is that, there would still be nothing to stop Albanese from being true to his past rhetoric about the importance of government transparency and releasing the report to inform public debate.

Australians have a right to know. The fact that the Prime Minister hasn’t already done this says a lot.

For me, given that the Government has cautioned me against publishing details that reveal security incompetence inside the Australian Submarine Agency, I’ll wait for the knock on the door from the Federal Police. I’m not going to be intimidated.

There’s a vital democratic principle to be defended – the right to publish embarrassing information about government. The only way to protect that right, especially in the face of Government bullying, is to publish.

AUKwardUS: Peter Dutton’s Albo nuclear wedge may cost us hundreds of billions

This post was originally published on Michael West.

After an epic five year FOI battle that involved two court cases and >$400K of taxpayer-funded legal fees, Christian Porter’s ‘legal’ advice to Scott Morrison on Sports Rorts has finally been released. Rex Patrick reports on what it says and why the Government has surrendered in the transparency fight.

The battle has finally been won. The Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet has released Attorney-General Christian Porter’s advice to Prime Minister Scott Morrison on the legality of Sports Rorts. MWM has reported extensively on the fight.

Rex v the A-G: will Labor keep Liberal dirt under the carpet?

Winners and Losers

The fight has produced winners and losers.

Morrison was the big winner. Without revealing its contents, he was able to use Porter’s letter to legitimise Senator McKenzie’s ‘Sports Rorts’ conduct and defuse the ‘Sports Rorts’ scandal, and the long drawn out FOI fight would ensure that the advice would not be seen until he had left Parliament.

Porter ends up a loser. As described below, his advice is erroneous and will be used by others to assess his legal competence as he engages in his post-parliamentary legal practice.

Current Labor Attorney-General Mark Dreyfus has lost what little credibility he had a ‘champion for transparency’ when he took up, and lost, the fight for the right of ministers to shred official documents when they leave office.

The same goes for the Australian Government Solicitor’s office who had to walk into the Federal Court with their tail between their legs, in the middle of a legal fight where the government claimed to no longer be in possession of the Porter’s advice, to confess one of their lawyers had a copy of the letter in his possession all along.

I walk away a winner, having successfully finished a transparency fight that I started in the public interest. But that victory would not have happened without barristers Stephen McDonald SC (now a Federal Court justice), Brendan Lim and Dr Amanda Sapienza and both Maurice Blackburn’s social justice legal team and the Grata Fund.

Regrettably the public are also a big loser, with the taxpayer funded legal fees exceeding $400K.  

But the public share my win on finally seeing the document, but perhaps more importantly from the Full Federal Court’s decision that ministers don’t own their documents, we do, and they are not permitted to shred them.

That’s indeed a pretty important precedent that supports democratic accountability and the integrity of government.  

The political fix

When a Prime Minister wants legal advice, he or she goes to the Solicitor-General. When a Prime Minister wants a political fix, he or she goes to the Attorney-General. This Porter letter is absolute proof of this.

At the time of the Sports Rorts scandal, Morrison needed a counter to an Auditor-General’s report that stated that Sports Minister Bridget McKenzie had acted without legislated authority to direct the Sports Commission in awarding grants.  

Auditor-General’s findings

If she had acted within the statutory framework of the Australian Sports Commission Act she would have had to first consult with the Commission’s chief executive and then publish and table her directions in Parliament. She didn’t want that sort of scrutiny for what were very obviously partisan political decisions.  

And Porter gave Morrison the ‘fix’ in his letter by insisting that a minister didn’t have to rely on statutory powers to direct the operation of a government agency.

In Porter’s view, ministers should be free to intervene politically in the work of statutory agencies, regardless of any legislated authority to do so. 

For the first time, Porter’s letter can be found here: 

Constitutional law professor Anne Twomey has now read Porter’s letter and advised MWM she stands by the submission she provided to the Senate’s ‘Sports Rorts’ 2020 inquiry.

The Australian Sports Commission was created as an independent corporate entity.  It is not a government department created under s 64 of the Constitution. Its existence, functions and powers are determined by legislation. Its relationship with the Minister is also determined by legislation  …

The Australian Sports Commission Act is explicit about the Minister’s powers …

Section 11 gives the Minister power to direct the Commission with respect to the ‘policies and practices to be followed by the Commission in the performance of its functions and the exercise of its powers’. It does not permit the Minister to exercise those powers. It only permits her to direct the Commission in its exercise of them.  Further, any such direction must be in writing, published in the Government Gazette and tabled in Parliament. No such direction was ever made.

This provision is manifestly directed at transparency and accountability in its exercise and evinces the absence of any general or informal power to direct the Commission. There would be no point in requiring that the Minister’s directions be gazetted and tabled if the Minister had an unwritten parallel power to direct the Commission that avoided tabling and gazettal.

Professor Twomey’s full views can be found here. 

Porter was wrong. Senator McKenzie acted beyond power.

Surrender by the Albanese Government

The question must be asked, Why did the Albanese Government belatedly give up a letter that was clearly legal advice?

Lost and found. Porter’s missing ‘Sportsrorts’ advice reappears. What’s the scam?

The answer to this question is political in nature and twofold.

The first reason is … there’s an election coming!

The Albanese Government has already taken a transparency dent with its unsuccessful fight to try to preserve the right of ministers to shred documents. Having been twice defeated in the Federal Court, they’ve lost their appetite for a further highly publicised fight to keep a scandalised document secret.

The second reason is … the Attorney-General doesn’t want a loss of status put on the record.

It might come as a surprise to some, but the Attorney-General has no constitutional or statutory role as government legal adviser. He’s been divested of the responsibility for giving legal advice under various Acts that allocates the legal work of the Commonwealth to the Solicitor-General, the Australian Government Solicitor, the Office of Parliamentary Counsel and the Director of Public Prosecutions.

The Attorney-General has no statutory responsibility for the giving of legal advice. Indeed, there’s no requirement in the Australian Constitution or Federal legislation for the Attorney-General to be a lawyer.

Senator Katy Gallagher, who has no legal degree, was sworn into the role of Attorney-General as part of an interim five-person ministry for nine days, until the full Albanese ministry was commissioned.

Significantly, the Attorney-General lacks the legal independence to formally give advice.  The Attorney is a member of the party of the government, and indeed the Cabinet to which they purportedly give advice to.

In circumstances where the Cabinet does not agree with or accept the Attorney-General’s legal advice the collective responsibility of Cabinet would cause the Attorney, as a Minister, to have to abandon public support for his own advice.

The Attorney-General’s fortunes are totally at the pleasure of the Prime Minister to whom the Attorney gives the advice. As a political appointee, the Attorney cannot bring a disinterested mind to the task of providing legal advice to the Prime Minister and Cabinet.

Rather it will be affected by personal loyalties to the Prime Minister, the Cabinet and his party.

The Australian Government Solicitor was aware of the fight I wanted to have to formally strip the Attorney-General of his purported legal advisor role. That’s not a precedent they want sitting on the public record. That’s why they rolled over and surrendered Porter’s advice without a further battle.

A repugnant saga

This whole repugnant saga, executed across both Liberal and Labor governments, has been an improper attack on the transparency and accountability of Government and a disgraceful waste of taxpayer’s money. 

While the advice has now been released, it’s historical information that can’t be used to hold a current government to account.

That’s what both major parties like. It’s been a five year legal battle that’s revealed very clearly their underlying opposition to transparency and their unity ticket on avoiding accountability.  

This post was originally published on Michael West.

The Government commissioned an official history of our operations in Timor and then censored the historian, removing an entire chapter. The partially redacted chapter obtained by MWM confirms lies told by the Howard Government. Rex Patrick reports.

In 2015, the Australian Government commissioned the War Memorial to write an official history of our peacekeeping operations in East Timor. UNSW history professor Craig Stockings was engaged as the War Memorial’s official historian and spent the next two years writing Volume One. It took another three years for it to be cleared for publication by Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade (DFAT) bureaucrats.

The official history was embroiled in controversy, resulting in a series of exchanges between Stockings and DFAT in late 2019, with DFAT seeking to censor the document. The then head of DFAT and now Governor of South Australia, Francis Adamson, wrote to Professor Stockings warning that an “honest history” of Australia’s peacekeeping role in Timor would touch “raw nerves”.

To eliminate information that DFAT didn’t like, Adamson suggested that the first nine chapters of the book dealing with the lead-up to Timor’s vote of independence be reduced significantly. Indeed, she thought a couple of chapters ought to do the job, deftly glossing over Australia’s tortured diplomatic acquiescence to Indonesia’s 1975 invasion of East Timor and two decades of downplaying atrocities and human rights abuse.

Stockings resisted, and hence, we ended up with a no-thrills launch of the book in December 2022 that DFAT hoped no one would notice.

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

We know about DFAT’s efforts at censorship because I FOI’d the correspondence, and after a five-year fight in the Information Commissioner’s domain, an order was made for the release of all the documents.

The Government has appealed, and in the last month, they have filed their arguments in the Administrative Review Tribunal (ART), with one affidavit heavily redacted and a second completely redacted, with the Government even seeking to suppress who their witness is or what Agency he or she comes from.

Entire chapter missing in action

What had been disclosed in the documents that have been released was the fact that one part of the official history, Annex 2, so offended the Government that they wanted it removed in its entirety.

This was an astonishing revelation. There was no such chapter in the published version of the official history. Remarkably, DFAT has succeeded in suppressing a major part of the story. Our troops were sent to deal with a violent militia, and the official history of the deployment excludes a chapter that explained who they were fighting and the strategy that the enemy employed.

It’s almost a Faulty Towers moment. As far as DFAT was concerned, it was a case of “Don’t mention the war”, or rather “Don’t mention the enemy”!

I therefore sought access to the expunged book under FOI.

On the eve of Christmas, a redacted version was reluctantly released. Whilst some of the document is redacted, it confirms that,

in 1999, the Howard Government engaged in acts of lying and deceit upon the Australian public.

A quarter of a century after pro-Indonesian militias massacred and burnt their way across East Timor, DFAT has been covering up the Indonesian military’s control over the violence and former Foreign Minister’s deceit on his knowledge of the situation.

Background to the censorship

In 1971/72, Australia and Indonesia negotiated their seabed boundaries. The outcome was very favourable to Australia, with the boundary drawn well north of the median line between the two countries. This was purportedly achieved by Australia in return for support for the concept of “archipelagic waters” in the 1982 United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS).

In 1974, when Portugal announced its intention to withdraw from its colonial possessions, which included East Timor, a number of indigenous political parties formed in Timor, with the two most popular, UDT and Fretlin, forming a coalition in 1975 with a unified goal of self-determination. A third party, APODETI, had a goal of integration with Indonesia. Internal disputes saw the coalition split, and violent grabs at power eventually resulted in a short civil war in August/September 1975, from which Fretlin emerged with control.

In September, Indonesia deployed as many as 200 special forces soldiers into Timor, and in October, a conventional assault commenced. Five Australian journalists, the ‘Balibo Five’, were executed by Indonesian troops in the border town of Balibo on 16 October 1975.

On 7 December 1975, Indonesia invaded Timor. Previously secret DFAT files show that the Whitlam Labor Government encouraged the action. It meant the favourable sea boundary line would be extended between Australia and Timor, delivering Australian and multinational oil and gas companies a bonanza prize.

Between 1975 and 1999, successive governments from the duopoly, Fraser, Hawke, Keating and Howard, quietly supported the Indonesians to the benefit of the oil and gas companies.

Over the same period, between 90,000 and 202,000 Timorese died as a consequence of resisting the Indonesians and pursuing freedom.

Disrupting the Independence Referendum

By 1998, a financially troubled Indonesian Government were spending significant funds dealing with the resistance in Timor. They decided and announced that the United Nations would be called in to hold a referendum to determine whether Timor was to have greater autonomy within Indonesia or independence.

Along with Australia (until pressure for supporting independence from the international community overwhelmed the Australian Government’s loyalty to the oil and gas companies), the Indonesian military, the TNI, opposed independence. They were worried about other ‘independence’’ trouble spots in Irian Jaya, Aceh, Ambon and Kalimantan but had also spent 15 years and lots of casualties trying to quell the Timorese.

And so the TNI decided that the prospect of an independent East Timor was unacceptable, and they set about disrupting the referendum, creating, organising, directing and supporting an on-ground militia. They targeted known supporters of independence for detention, assault, sexual violence, torture and murder. Their families were often destroyed, and family members faced sustained violence themselves, including sexual assault.

The strategy was to suppress the independence movement and serve as a signal as to what might happen if they voted for independence.

While all of this was happening, and despite the Australian government knowing otherwise, the government was denying TNI’s involvement.

Then foreign minister Alexander Downer told ABC Radio in February 1999 that the government could not confirm reports the Indonesian military was arming militias in East Timor. “The Indonesian military are denying this,” he said. “It’s obviously very hard for us to verify one way or the other.”

According to Downer the problem was one of a few “rogue elements” – local pro-Indonesian militias – and that the Indonesian military could be trusted to provide security for the self-determination ballot.

Alexander Downer’s lies

However, a series of leaked Defence and DFAT documents, reported through 1999 by The Age, ABC Radio and TV, the Bulletin magazine and other media outlets, told a very different story.

For example, a secret Defence Intelligence Organisation brief, dated 4 March 1999 and reported by the ABC AM program on 23 April, reported that “The [Indonesian] military in East Timor are clearly protecting, and in some instances operating with the militias … [Indonesian military chief] General Wiranto is at least turning a blind eye … the military will continue to support intimidation and violence or at least won’t prevent it. Further violence is certain and Dili will be a focus.

Although still heavily censored, especially in regard to DFAT and Australian intelligence community assessments of TNI activities, the expunged but now released draft chapter from the official history

confirms the Government knew about the Indonesian military’s orchestration of militia violence.

There is no doubt whatsoever that the Howard Government knew the truth, and Foreign Minister Downer’s refusal to tell that truth helped take diplomatic pressure off Indonesia.

This wasn’t by accident. It was by design.  Another leaked document, a DFAT cable first published in 1999, showed the Howard government was not merely reluctant to argue for an international peacekeeping presence in East Timor but actively worked against the idea. Then DFAT Secretary Ashton Calvert told the US State Department that talk about peacekeeping was “defeatist”.

In any case DFAT’s preferred outcome was for East Timor to move towards “autonomy” but remain part of Indonesia.

The newly released official history chapter shows those arguments were made in full knowledge of the Indonesian military’s orchestration of atrocities in an effort to prevent East Timor from becoming independent and with a clear expectation of the violence that would follow an independence vote in the absence of an international peacekeeping presence.

Read the full (redacted) chapter here.

Despite the obvious risks, the East Timorese people did vote for independence, and Australia eventually did send in peacekeepers, though only after the Indonesian military had torched Dili, thousands of people died, and tens of thousands were forcibly removed to squalid camps in West Timor.

Between the text and the documents that DFAT held, as evidenced in the footnotes, it is impossible for any honest person to deny that the Government knew what was happening on the ground in East Timor prior to the independence vote.  It wasn’t a few “rouge elements” as Downer claimed.  It was the Indonesian military pulling the strings.

DFAT and Downer knew this, but told a different story to the Australian public and the world.

An inconvenient truth

DFAT has been covering up for Downer for a quarter of a century. They’ve been denying the truth about Australian policy toward Timor for half a century – all the way back to Prime Minister Gough Whitlam’s acquiescence to the prospective Indonesian invasion in 1975 and the duplicity of both the Whitlam and Fraser Governments over the Indonesian military’s murder of the Balibo Five journalists.

It’s a track record of shame that’s continued to the present day with the 2004 spying on the new Timorese government’s sea boundary negotiating team, defrauding Timor for the benefit of Woodside, and the current Labor Government’s refusal to support Timor-Leste’s plans for energy development in favour of schemes that would maximise Australia’s exploitation of gas reserves for the benefit of Japanese and Korean industry.

All along, it’s been about a grab for oil and gas, pursued through the most cynical realpolitik diplomacy shrouded in deceit and secrecy – even to the point of attempting to censor and re-write history.

More to come

I’m still fighting in the ART for the complete exchanges between DFAT and the official historian, even if I can’t currently see their evidence or who their key witness is, and will now commence a new fight against the extensive redactions in the expunged chapter.

But there’s even more censoring underway with Volume Two of the official history stuck in purgatory as the War Memorial refuses to exclude elements of history from that volume. That controversy sits with Prime Minister Albanese at the moment.  Will he have the courage to do the right thing and let the truth be told?  I fear not. Time will tell, but I’ll be keeping up the fight.

Spies Like Us: how Timor’s oil and gas delivered justice to Bernard Collaery

 

This post was originally published on Michael West.

A new report suggests that the number of GP clinics offering bulk-billing to adults without concessions is in sharp decline, but is bulk-billing more broadly on life-support? Zacharias Szumer investigates.

We regret to inform dear readers of MWM that, in order to explain what the hell is going in with bulk-billing in Australia, we’re going to have to get mildly statistical. 

Trying to get your head around this stuff can make one feel like piñata being bludgeoned by five baseball-bat wielding statisticians – all of whom have to be pressed to go behind their well-rehearsed lines. 

Nonetheless, your correspondent has selflessly dedicated his weekend to taking on the role of this piñata, so let’s get down to it. 

Australia’s Cleanbill of health?

Since 2023, a small organisation called Cleanbill has been releasing statistics on the number of GP clinics in Australia that offer to bulk-bill people without concession cards.

This outfit rings up every clinic they find and asks if they’re taking on new patients and how much it will cost. 

According to Cleanbill’s latest report, the method attempts to replicate what many adults looking to see a GP without bankrupting themselves do on a regular basis. 

“It aims to provide the best understanding of what every GP clinic around you would say if you, as an adult without concessions, asked for their pricing and availability information for a standard consultation during regular, weekday business hours.” 

In addition to feeding this info into a public directory for people looking for accurate info about GP clinics in their area  (as an aside: why have governments left it up to a tiny organisation to provide this quite useful service?), Cleanbill also puts out an annual report. 

So, what do the latest numbers say?

Depends where you live 

For one, those in NSW will on average find it a whole lot easier to see a GP with no out-of-pocket costs than someone in Tasmania. 

Obviously, there’ll be a lot of variation within an area as large as NSW, and people out in Murrumbidgee – or in one of the nation’s many ‘bulk-billing deserts’ – probably won’t have the options of someone in Parramatta. 

In fact, MWM has heard that NSW’s high-rate of bulk-billing GPs is largely attributable to a massive concentration of such clinics in Western Sydney, but don’t quote us on that. 

Cleanbill’s data also shows that the proportion of clinics across the nation offering bulk-billing to non-concession holders has declined pretty steadily since 2023. 

 

Because the decision to bulk-bill a patient is at the discretion of a GP, these figures could be somewhat of an overcount – or so we hear from unnameable, top-secret, off-the-record types in government. 

Different measurement, different result

As you might have guessed, the Labor government isn’t exactly the biggest fan of the Cleanbill data – or so they will tell you in top-secret, off-the-record comments.

Looking at total visits to a GP – a metric which does include under-16s and concession card holders – their numbers show an increase in bulk-billing over the previous year. 

Just over 77 per cent GP visits across the country were bulk-billed in November 2024 – a 1.6 percentage point increase from October 2023, according to a November 2024 press release by Health Minister Mark Butler. 

Butler’s call

Butler attributed the rise to their tripling of Medicare incentives for GPs to bulk-bill people with concession cards and under-16s, which came into effect in November 2023.

Essentially this is a payment that GPs get for not charging a concession card holder or a child for a visit; it’s not rebate that applies to general patients. 

While the government’s data does include are people with concession cards and under-16s, it doesn’t show the degree to which this uptick is largely just an uptick in these particular cohorts.

However, Grattan Institute health program director Peter Breadon told MWM  that it was “likely” that this was the case. 

Given the targeted nature of Labor’s incentive-tripling, this wouldn’t be a surprise.

Breadon also suggested Labor shouldn’t focus support solely on these groups. 

“I think if they do make an investment to further increase bulk billing, it would be good to look at something broader than something that just targets people on concession cards and children,” Breadon said. 

Free-falling facts

In a statement provided to MWM, Mark Butler said the government’s investments in Medicare have “stopped the free-fall in bulk billing that was created under the Liberal and Nationals government”. 

Now, that particular choice of wording – “created under”, rather than “occurring under” – may have been intentional, because the Australian Associated Press (AAP) fact-checked one of Butler’s “free-fall” claims earlier in 2024 and found it was misleading.

The figures that the government was crowing about in the 29 April 2024 media release that AAP examined related to the proportion of GP visits that did not involve any patient payments – a  bulk-billing measure known as ‘GP non-referred attendances’. 

As the following graph shows, there was a net increase in such bulk billing rates during the Coalition’s decade in power. 

While bulk-billing rates had started to fall prior to Labor’s 2022 election victory, they continued to drop after Labor took government.

Of course, arresting a trajectory in a system as massive as Medicare isn’t something one would expect a newly elected government to achieve overnight.

Still, the graph above doesn’t show anything an intellectually sound speaker of English would call a “free-fall” happening between 2014 and 2022. 

When the AAP asked Butler how exactly bulk-billing was in “free-fall” under the Coalition, one of his spokespeople pointed to “a different measure of bulk billing that was not mentioned in the media release”.

AAP didn’t say what this measure was.

MWM asked the minister’s office about it but didn’t receive a response before deadline. 

A ‘Mediscare’ redux?

The record of the Coalition and Peter Dutton on Medicare will become a key plank of Labor’s pitch to voters in the upcoming federal election, according to anonymous party figures backgrounding Nine-Fairfax journos in early January. 

During Dutton’s tenure as health minister, the Coalition government attempted to slash Medicare rebates and introduce a mandatory fee for GP visits. 

Labor proceeded to weaponise the Coalition’s record on public health to great effect in the 2016 election, running a highly effective campaign that the conservative side of politics planned to privatise Medicare. 

There was no publicly available evidence that the Coalition planned to do this, but Labor pushed their opponents onto the back foot and forced then prime minister Malcolm Turnbull into declaring that “Medicare will never, ever, ever be privatised”.

While the conservatives clung on to government, Labor did far better than many predicted and took 14 lower house seats from the Coalition, reducing them to a one-seat majority. 

GP payment overhaul on the cards

According to the Labor sources quoted by The Age and Sydney Morning Herald journos, Labor is also considering an overhaul of how GPs are paid under Medicare.

This is something that Breadon agrees with. 

“The way we do it now is very crude, where you’re a concession card holder or you’re not, and you get this subsidy for bulk billing those concession cardholders.

“But there’s lots of people who are struggling with out-of-pocket fees who aren’t concession card holders. 

“And there’s lots of people that GPs are struggling to see quickly because of the funding model.” 

“So, there’s a bigger structural issue here about how we pay GPs.” 

Makes pathological sense. Mark Butler ignores lobbyists cries on atomic data

This post was originally published on Michael West.

Aspiring PM Peter Dutton could find himself in a three-cornered contest against Ali France and a Teal independent. Andrew Gardiner reports on Peter Dutton’s woman problem. 

Conservative commentator Andrew Bolt sees 2025 as “the year woke finally dies,” the Albanese Labor government one of many to be drowned, he predicts, in a tsunami of culture war conflict and economic angst.

“America has already swung right; next will be Germany and Canada in elections this year (plus) Australia, too, in our own election in probably April or May,” Bolt foresaw. 

But are Bolt and the man he sees surfing this purported tsunami into The Lodge, Peter Dutton, getting ahead of themselves? Dutton, the member for marginal Dickson in Brisbane’s north west, will for the first time face a Teal independent candidate for the seat. MWM has learnt the candidate is expected to be announced on January 27.

Dutton’s Labor opponent in Dickson, Ali France, came within a little over 3,000 votes of victory, two-party preferred (2PP), at the 2022 federal election.

The seat’s marginal status renders the Teal candidate a real threat to Dutton’s career as an MP (less as an aspiring PM) potentially siphoning moderate LNP voters away from him on what many see as his ‘Achilles heel’ issues: the treatment of women, the environment and – notably – honesty in politics. 

PM in waiting 

Bolt’s ‘PM-in-waiting’ in fact faces a make-or-break 2025. While Dutton will be comforted by a national 2PP swing of 2.4 per cent to the coalition in polls over the past 18 months, Queensland was by far the LNP’s strongest state in 2022, producing a ‘ceiling affect’ that has capped gains there to roughly half the national average. 

In Dickson (Qld.) that number could be dwarfed by Dutton’s haemorrhaging of votes to the Teals, meaning he must fight on two fronts, including a rearguard action in Dickson. After all, in our Westminster system of government, you can’t be PM if you’re not an MP. 

John Howard is testament to that.

Like other groups promoting a community independent, Dickson Decides sells itself as a grassroots movement with the goal of bringing “transparent, community-focused representation to Dickson”. According to sources, the group is founded on community engagement principles and eschews ‘party politics as usual,’ adhering broadly to policies promoting the environment and integrity in government.   

Locally, it’s expected Dutton’s opponents will call him out on the issue of honesty in politics. As Michael Bradley of Marque Lawyers points out, Dutton “says things that are objectively untrue, things he cannot possibly believe (and) he does so often, with increasing frequency and flagrancy”.

Dutton’s opponents can be expected to exploit this directly at the mid-campaign Dickson debate for which they will be pushing. How it plays with locals in an electorate of contrasting surrounds and demographics may ultimately determine who wins the seat. 

Environment, women, integrity, nuclear

On the environment, readers are no doubt aware of Dutton’s spruiking what he calls the ‘net zero’ option of nuclear energy, to be delivered by seven proposed nuclear power plants and two small modular reactors at a cost of $331 billion, with a promised reduction in power bills of 44 per cent.

His opponents say Dutton’s numbers are based on flawed modelling, “won’t pass the pub test” and will prolong our dependence on energy from fossil fuels. 

How does this debate impact the result in Dickson? In a Redbridge survey taken last year, women strongly disapproved of lifting bans on nuclear power (men not so much) with Dutton’s opponents counting on a large number of women ‘defecting’ from LNP to ‘Teal’ and withholding their preferences from him.    

Therein lies Dutton’s biggest problem: women, both across Australia and locally. In a three cornered Dickson contest against two female opponents including the popular and accomplished Ali France (Labor) Dutton’s many stumbles on women’s issues will be centre stage locally during the campaign.  

Remember Dutton’s ‘she said, he said’ comments regarding Brittany Higgins, his description of journalist Samantha Maiden (above) as a “mad f___ing witch,” or his claim that refugee women were “trying it on” with rape claims as part of a ploy to get to Australia? Women remember stuff like that, and it may cost him.

Where the money is

Those keen to write Dutton’s Dickson epitaph need to keep in mind both his survival skills and, now, his billionaire ‘ace in the hole’. Dutton has won this marginal seat at eight straight elections since 2001, utilising an array of clever methods over the journey, and has recently forged a powerful relationship with the wealthiest Australian, Gina Rinehart. 

Illustrating what some call his fealty to the Hancock Prospecting matriarch, Dutton has as Opposition Leader: 

• travelled to the Pilbara as Rinehart’s guest (June 2022); 
• flown to Sydney courtesy of Rinehart to (he says) attend a Bali bombing memorial (October 2022);  
• jetted, courtesy of billionaire Tim Roberts, to a Rinehart party at Roy Hill in WA (November 2023, see photo above) and, most remarkably: 
• taken time out from an important Melbourne by-election campaign for a 40 minute Perth pit stop at Rinehart’s birthday party (March 2024).  

That’s quite a friendship, in which Rinehart “appears to have been rewarded with a key role in developing what passes for Dutton’s policy positions”, wrote Crikey’s Bernard Keane.

Dividends include Dutton’s embrace of Rinehart-supported policies like an increase in the income threshold pensioners can earn without losing payments, migration cuts and, of course, the spruiking of nuclear energy. 

Doing a Josh

Anyone prepared to turn Rinehart’s most coveted outcomes into government policy can likely count on substantial support should, say, his seat be under real threat from a pesky, Teal-clad booster of “bird-killing wind generators and massive solar panel stretches”. Certainly, sources close to the Teal campaign expect as much. 

“There’s no depth to which (Rinehart’s) pockets don’t reach. I expect saturation advertising – just like Kooyong in 2022 – if it’s close,” one source told MWM.  

In many respects, Dickson in 2025 does indeed mirror Kooyong (Victoria) three years ago. Back then, Josh Frydenberg, an aspiring Liberal Prime Minister beloved by big time donors, found himself caught in the cyclonic headwinds of another Teal-adorned grassroots movement. 

In Dickson, we see all these elements and more, with Australia’s society (and environment) at a clearly-defined crossroads and one candidate – Dutton – determined to take a hard right turn.

The people v the money

“It’s the biggest campaign in the country, with an unprecedented ability to attract volunteers and donors, made even spicier by the fact Dutton divides us like few others,” a Teal source told MWM.  

Three years ago, money poured into Kooyong to save Frydenberg, but this came at the expense of other, needy electorates where it might have been better-spent. Could the LNP and its backers make the same mistake twice?  

“That’s the bonus, even if we happen to lose in Dickson,” the source told MWM. “There are community independents running in 36 seats across Australia and no matter how many oligarchs chip in to stop us, their resources are finite.” 

“We, on the other hand, rely on people power, and there’s no shortage of volunteers ready to work for us.”  

MWM sought comment from the Teal, Dutton and France campaigns, but had not heard back by publication time.  

This post was originally published on Michael West.

The US is mired in its biggest naval battle since WW2 and Australia is commanding its Red Sea Task Force against the Houthi rebels of Yemen who are trying to stop the genocide in Gaza. Michael West reports.

It is the quintessential case of being dragged into war, by stealth, without the consent of the people. Australia is at war with Yemen, or to be precise the Houthis, but you won’t hear much about it from the government or the media.

Since October, Australia has led the “Combined Task Force (CTF) 153” to combat the Iran-backed Houthis in the Red Sea. It is not going well. In fact, hostilities are escalating this week. The Houthis repelled an attack by the USS aircraft carrier Harry S Truman and fired another round of missiles into Israel.

With the US navy now mired in their biggest naval battle since the Second World War, overnight US President Elect, Donald Trump, upped the rhetoric:

“If those hostages [in Gaza] aren’t back by the time I get into office, all hell will break out in the Middle East. And it will not be good for Hamas. And it will not be good frankly for anyone. All hell will break out.”

Yet the might of the US military, alongside naval allies from the UK, France, Australia and other nations, have been unable to defeat the impoverished rebel forces of the Houthis firing off drones to disrupt shipping in the Red Sea and landing a few missiles in the heart of Israel 2,000k away.

The problem is that disinformation is rife. The Red Sea operation is mostly a secret. MWM put questions to Defence as to Australia’s involvement in the Red Sea task force but no response was forthcoming. 

In the wake of the October 7 Hamas attacks on Israel and Israel’s extreme retaliation in Gaza, the Houthis of Yemen declared war on Israel. Their demands are simple. They vowed to attack Israel and any ship connected to Israel until the IDF stopped its genocide of the Palestinians in Gaza.

The Suez Canal accounts for 10-15% of world trade. The war has therefore taken a toll on world shipping, and on the allies military resources as it has dragged on for a year.

Amid the failure of the allies to publicise their activities and the propaganda on both sides of the conflict, finding an accurate account of the war is difficult. This is the best we could find, from James Angell on Substack, who goes through a year of claims and incident reports to pull together a comprehensive account of the Red Sea mission.

“US Navy fighter pilots and sailors returning to the US after months of being deployed to shoot down Houthi missiles and drones over the Red Sea have spoken of the trauma of what is now the navy’s most intense sea fighting since World War II. US pilots tell of ‘traumatising’ deployment to stop Red Sea attacks by Houthis,” writes Angell.

“According to The Associated Press (AP), sailors would see incoming missiles just seconds before being destroyed by ship defence systems. Most on the ships were not used to being attacked, Commander Benjamin Orloff, a Navy pilot, said.

“‘I’ll be honest: It was a little traumatising for the group. It’s something that we don’t think about a lot until you’re presented with it,’ he said. A US aircraft carrier strike group deployed to the Red Sea in mid-October. After months of operations to shoot down missiles and drones, the deployment was twice extended placing additional stress on the crew of roughly 7,000 sailors, the AP reports.”

Australia’s involvement

Amid the sparse disclosures by Australian Defence it was announced in October that Australia would head up the Combined Task Force.

“Air bases in Australia have helped with this week’s United States air strike on underground Houthi weapons stores in Yemen, an attack that has been seen as a warning to Iran,” said the ABC.

“The Department of Defence confirmed Australia provided support for US strikes on October 17, targeting the Houthi facilities ‘through access and overflight for US aircraft in northern Australia’.

And in another story: “Acting Prime Minster Richard Marles announced earlier that the country would send a “significant number” of ADF troops and two RAAF aircraft to the Middle East.” Apart from that, not much information is publicly available.

We can assume the secretive Pine Gap surveillance facilities are being used to help Israel in its brutal Gaza campaign. We can also assume that it is likely that casualties of the war will escalate. Notwithstanding Trump’s bellicose rhetoric about Gaza, the Houthis by all accounts are fiercely determined to escalate against Israel.

Back-channel efforts by the Allies to negotiate with the Houthis have yet failed. The Houthis position has remained steadfast, that Israel has to cease its ‘seige of Gaza’. And amid the IDF’s atrocities against the Palestinians, world opinion is not behind the Allies.

Australia’s Attorney-General Mark Dreyfus, jetted off to meetings in Israel this week, to “mend the factured relationship” with the government of Benjamin Netanyahu.

Imagine “patching up relations” with a state perpetrating genocide…👇
Israel-Palestine: Mark Dreyfus plans trip to Israel to patch up relations https://t.co/A9CmKf3rhH

— Dr Sheep Person Podge (@noplaceforsheep) January 6, 2025

This news did not go down well on social media with almost ubiquitous condemnation that an Australian minister would travel to Israel to kowtow to the government of an alleged war criminal whose activities in Gaza had led to world condemnation and a case in the International Court of Justice for plausible genocide.

Meanwhile, reports by US think tanks claim China is funding the Houthis, as well as Iran, as the Houthis are allowing Chinese ships safe passage in the Red Sea. Civilians in Yemen continue to die in aerial bombardments by US and Israel fighter jets, and the Houthis continue to hit Israel with missiles and Red Sea shipping is down as much as 90%.

The Allies’ rhetoric that the Houthis are a primitive rebel group is wearing thin, such is the success of their drone warfare which has endured for more than a year. The Houthis had previously survived a decade long war from the US-backed Saudi regime (with weapons supplied by Australia) and their popularity in Yemen as only grown with their determination to fight Israel.

For Australia, the stakes are rising. If it is the duty under the Genocide Convention of nations to oppose genocide, what is the legal position of countries engaged in war against people trying to uphold the Geneva Convention and stop a genocide?

---

Questions put to Defence Media last week:

Could you please provide an update on how the Yemen operation is travelling? 

Is Australia still leading the Combined Maritime Force’s Combined Task Force (CTF)? 

How many Australians are deployed, and from what branches of the military?

What is Australia’s legal position/advice in regards of the impact of our military involvement in this operation and the risks associated with the Genocide Convention and proceedings in the ICJ?

Australia defies UN pleas over atrocities in Yemen, escalates weapons exports to Saudis

This post was originally published on Michael West.

Government advertising is always a controversial topic. Is it in the public interest, or just political party spruiking at taxpayer expense? Rex Patrick on the government’s huge advertising spend.

News that the Federal Government has spent a record of $251 million on advertising last year has raised integrity questions, and accusations of vote buying.

Naughty and nice

Of course, some Government advertising is needed and there have been a number of campaigns that would squarely pass the test of being necessary and appropriate.

Defence Force recruitment advertisements, asbestos awareness campaigns and child safety campaigns fit this category. They are ads that seek to encourage individuals to do something; sign up to the ADF; avoid putting themselves in harm’s way in relation to asbestos; or, for parents to talk to their children about inappropriate touching or the inappropriateness of tweens and teens sending naked pictures to ‘friends’ and ‘internet acquaintances’.

Then there is other advertising that is little more than self-promotion. It’s “hey, look at how good a government we are” vote buying advertising.

Tax cuts and FMIA campaigns questionable

Stage 3 tax cuts changes and Future Made in Australia campaigns fit into this second highly questionable category. These campaigns were about increases in the amount on money that automatically went back into a person’s bank account when they received their pay or about a government manufacturing policy. Neither required citizens do anything.

it’s not okay just because the major parties both do it

This is victory lap advertising designed to tell what the Government has done in the hope that voters might be more inclined to vote them back into power.

This is not just the current Labor Government doing this. Coalition governments have done the same when they were in power. But it’s not okay just because the major parties both do it.

But there’s an extra smell to the Albanese Government’s approach.

Cabinet role

In order to understand the smell better, it is necessary to understand the purpose of Cabinet and Cabinet confidentiality.

Australia has a cabinet system of government. That is, a government made up of ministers, drawn from parliamentarians of the party that hold the numbers necessary in the House to pass supply bills. From these ministers the Prime Minister (PM) nominates senior ministers to form Cabinet.

The Cabinet is the central decision-making body of the executive government bound by two conventions; all members are bound to support the collective decisions of Cabinet, and the discussions in Cabinet are absolutely confidential.

All major policies of a government are approved by Cabinet and all major decisions of Government are taken by Cabinet. They are taken secretly and collectively – any revelation of a division in Cabinet (caused by a breach of secrecy) or split in solidarity can give rise to a loss of confidence in the government, which could in turn cause a vote of no confidence in the House of Representatives to discharge a government.

The secrecy of cabinet is really important; but not because of the content being deliberated by cabinet, rather because of the need for collective responsibility.

Federal Court Justice White ruled that PM Scott Morrison’s (and, flowing from that, PM Albanese’s) National Cabinet is not a Cabinet deserving of secrecy, because it is not a body which has collective responsibility; State Premiers and Chief Ministers can walk away from National Cabinet not agreeing with its decisions. (as we saw divided decisions on the closure of schools and borders during COVID).

There are, however, sub committees of Cabinet that enjoy Cabinet secrecy protections – the National Security Committee and the Expenditure (Budget) Review Committee of Cabinet are examples.

Informal and powerless

Cabinet is not mentioned in the constitution and it has no formal power – its decisions are implemented by the executive powers of the Governor-General through recommendations of Cabinet, the powers of ministers on instruction from Cabinet and through legislation (assuming a government can get the legislation through the Parliament).

Cabinet is a creature of convention only, with the membership, structure and rules determined by the PM, within the bounds of the constitution and the law.

Cabinet abuse

The lack of formality around Cabinet, coupled with its accepted secrecy status, can give rise to abuse.

Putting aside the issue of Scott Morrison’s erroneous claims as to the status of National Cabinet, motivated by his default desire for government secrecy, he provided us with a much more sinister abuse; his Governance Committee of Cabinet.

The Governance Committee of Cabinet was set up by Morrison to provide advice and oversight of governance and integrity issues, which included, but were not limited to, the Statement of Ministerial Standards and issues arising from the Lobbyist Code.

It consisted of Morrison himself, Deputy PM Barnaby Joyce then Micheal McCormack then Joyce again, Treasurer Josh Frydenberg and attorneys-general Christian Porter then Michaelia Cash.

Issues of governance and integrity are ones that require absolute transparency. By setting up this committee all scandals including Sports Rorts, Car Park Rorts or breaches of ministerial standards could be referred to the Governance Committee of Cabinet so they became Cabinet secrets and could be buried in the vaults of the National Archives for at least 20 years.

Morrison’s dirty little secrets committee

It was Morrisons ‘dirty little secrets committee of Cabinet’ serving as a vacuum cleaner for all manner of scandal.

Prime Minister Anthony Albanese promised higher standards of governance and transparency and he did not set up such a committee when he formed Government in 2022.

On day one of his new government Albanese did set up a new Cabinet Committee structure, and in doing so set up a new dirty little government secrets committee one dealing with the vexed issue of government advertising – the “Government Communications Subcommittee” of Cabinet.

Albo’s advertising secrets sub-committee

The designated function of the Subcommittee is to provide oversight and coordination of Government advertising. 

The Subcommittee’s members are Finance Minister Katy Gallagher, Education Minister Jason Clare, Special Minister of State Don Farrell, Environment Minister Tanya Plibersek and Minister Assisting the Prime Minister Patrick Gorman. 

The normal government advertising governance regime has been for a department to propose a brief to a minister, the minister endorses it and the Independent Communications Committee reviews it for compliance with the Australian Government Guidelines on Information and Advertising Campaigns by non-corporate Commonwealth entities.

Importantly, both the Parliament and citizens using Freedom of Information (FOI) rights could request access to the brief to the ministers, the minister’s endorsement documents and the Independent Communications Committee’s documents to conduct their own scrutiny of government advertising decisions.

But under the Government Communications Subcommittee of Cabinet regime set up by Anthony Albanese, the briefs that went to the Minister are now effectively Cabinet briefs, the minister’s endorsement is now the endorsement of Cabinet and the Independent Communications Committee is left dealing with Cabinet documentation.

All of this is now beyond the reach of the Parliament and the FOI regime.

I know this because in April 2023 I requested Independent Communications Committee documents using FOI and got a response littered with (FOI Act Section 34) Cabinet exemption claims.

The Government Communications Subcommittee of Cabinet does not deal with major policies or major decisions of Government. It’s a deliberately crafted vacuum cleaner for all manner of advertising scandal constituting abuse of taxpayer funds.

It’s a smelly road-block on integrity checking.

And a corruption incubator

Many people think that corruption by politicians involves the receipt of some form of financial benefit. But that isn’t the case.

Politicians, including ministers, are not only chosen by the people but exercise their legislative and executive powers as representatives of the people. They have a fundamental duty to serve and, in serving, to act with fidelity and with a single-mindedness for the welfare of the community’. These are not my words, rather words adopted by Justices Gageler, Nettle and Gordan in the High Court case of Day [No 2] [2017] HCA 14.

Ministers stray from their duty when they do anything which involves conscious self-interest. That self-interest includes the desire to stay in power. And when it involves the use of public money, the breach of duty turns into one of corruption.

The UniParty Reform | The West Report

No-one can say Anthony Albanese’s ministerial colleagues are engaging in corruption in spending taxpayers’ money on advertising with the goal of winning votes (note that decisions of the Government Communications Subcommittee of Cabinet need to be endorsed by the Cabinet).

That would need to be evidenced by specific facts. But those facts are not available to anyone wanting to know, and won’t be until 2044/5 when knowledge of it will be of no practical accountability use.

What we can say is that Albanese has, in a considered decision early in his reign as PM, set up a corruption incubator. He promised better, but went another way. As government advertising surges in the run-up to this year’s federal election, voters should think about that.

This post was originally published on Michael West.

The new Administrative Review Tribunal (ART) just ruled the $2B, no $6B, no $12B Snowy 2.0 project immune from public scrutiny. The decision paves the way for secrecy over Peter Dutton’s nuclear ambitions. Rex Patrick reports.

In April 2023, I made a Freedom of Information (FOI) application for access to Snowy Hydro Limited project reports about Snowy 2.0 pumped storage power scheme to the Minister of Climate Change and Energy, Chris Bowen. I also asked for the briefs on Snowy 2.0 prepared by the Department of Climate Change, Energy, the Environment and Water (DCCEEW) for the Minister.

Suspecting things were off the rails, I wanted to see what Snowy Hydro was saying to the DCCEEW in relation to Snowy 2.0’s progress, or lack thereof, and what DCCEEW was then saying to Minister Chris Bowen.

In August 2023 the Government announced a Snowy 2.0 ‘reset’; a marketing label for a massive cost blowout and schedule delay. That caused me to made a further request for the Snowy Hydro Corporate Plan update sent to Bowen and Finance Minister Katy Gallagher to convince them to back the project cost doubling from $6B to $12B.

Dear Ministers – why do costs and timelines for Snowy 2.0 keep shifting yet are so readily approved?

 

Access to the project reports and ministerial briefs was flatly refused and so I appealed the matter to the Administrative Appeals Tribunal, now repackaged by Attorney-General Mark Dreyfus as the Administrative Review Tribunal (ART).

Tribunal rejects transparency

In a decision made by Deputy President Peter Britton-Jones, the Tribunal has affirmed the access refusal decisions, effectively shutting down any FOI scrutiny of Snowy 2.0. This mega-project, which has blown out by $10B, is now shrouded in secrecy, blocking the gaze of members of the public, who are paying for the project.

The ART decision has blown a huge hole in government transparency and accountability because it creates a model that could, and almost certainly will, be used to exempt Opposition Leader Peter Dutton’s $331B nuclear power program from any future public scrutiny. It’s a secrecy barn door that’s big enough to drive a nuclear reactor through.

Protecting business information

How did this happen? 

The FOI Act has some reasonable protections in it to ensure sensitive business information is protected from release. 

Section 47 of the FOI Act protects trade secrets or commercially valuable information from being disclosed; a company’s ‘11 secret herbs and spices’ stays just that, secret. No other consideration; it’s a full stop exemption from the requirement to disclose.

Section 47G of the FOI Act protects more general business information which, if released, could adversely affect the business in some way. But this particular disclosure exemption clause is conditional on whether the disclosure would be contrary the public interest.

And that’s fair enough – when a company starts taking money from the public for public purposes, if there’s public interest in disclosing the information (like project cost and schedule blowouts), that just sits as a cost of doing business with the Government.

These are important provisions in our FOI law. Last year eighty-three thousand businesses provided their services or products in exchange for $99.6B of public money.

Removing the public interest

There’s another FOI exemption, Section 45, inserted into Act to prevent a “breach of confidence”; that is a promise to keep information confidential – like Aboriginal tribal secrets provided to government in native title matters; artistic assessments by experts of works of art under consideration for purchase – things that need confidentiality but are not business information.

That’s how the Section 45 exemption was presented to the Parliament way back in 1982 when our FOI law was first debated and legislated. In past decisions of the Tribunal Deputy President Britten-Jones has decided not to give that presentation any weight. Instead, Section 45 is interpreted as an unbreakable secrecy clause whenever government and a business agree that it should apply to information that the business has provided to government.

The end result is that now, despite the Parliament determining that business information should be disclosed if that disclosure is not contrary to the public interest, that legislated provision should not be honoured.

Section 45 is, as a result of past Tribunal decisions, the ‘go to’ exemption from departments trying to protect their projects from any scrutiny.

Quacking like a duck

The only reason I actually challenged DCCEEW and the Minister’s FOI decision in this instance is because there’s a carve out in the FOI Act that says Section 45 does not apply if the disclosure of the document would constitute a ‘breach of confidence’ owed to the Commonwealth.

So, one question before the Tribunal was, is Snowy Hydro ‘the Commonwealth’?

To me, the answer was clear. 

While Snowy Hydro is a distinct legal entity, it is an 100% government-owned corporation, and is largely funded by the public (the Snowy 2.0 ‘basket case’ project is funded by the taxpayer to the tune of $7B and the rest of the money comes from electricity customers – you). 

Snowy Hydro has its board appointed by shareholder ministers and remunerated in accordance with a determination of the Commonwealth’s Remuneration Tribunal.

Snowy Hydro is subject to control by the Commonwealth, is obliged to surrender information (unfettered by any confidentiality obligations) requested by a shareholder minister or the Auditor-General  or the Senate.

I summarised this legal situation in my submissions to the Tribunal, stating, “If it walks like a duck, looks like a duck and quacks like a duck – it’s a duck!”

The lawyers arguing the government’s case insisted none of that mattered. It might look like a duck, it might even be a government duck but it somehow wasn’t a Commonwealth duck.

Britton-Jones decided it was an elusive night owl, declaring that Snowy Hydro Limited is not the Commonwealth.

Dutton’s Nuclear Power Limited

If the ART decision stands, Snowy Hydro will be effectively excluded from FOI scrutiny. That means an impenetrable wall of secrecy, barring investigation of this government owned and controlled company’s mismanagement of the Snowy 2.0 project and its huge cost to taxpayers.  

But that may well be only the beginning of things.

The pieces are all in place for the Coalition’s nuclear power plans to be shrouded in secrecy – thanks in large measure to arguments presented by the Albanese government’s lawyers.

That’s right, Minister Bowen’s legal team has opened the nuclear barn door for Peter Dutton.

Modular Reactors. Peter Dutton hasn’t done his nuclear homework

 

Here’s how Dutton will do it. He just has to follow the Snowy Hydro model and he can ensure than no project reports will ever make it into the hands of the public. The steps are as follows:

1. Legislate to set up ‘Nuclear Power Limited’ by way of statute – the ‘Nuclear Power Limited’ Act – with two Ministers to be shareholders in behalf of government.
2. Include the following words in the Act – “‘Nuclear Power Limited’ is not, and does not represent, the Crown”.
3. Subject ‘Nuclear Power limited’ to a policy requirement to report project status to the shareholder ministers (so they at least know what’s going on).
4. Enter into an agreement between Nuclear Power Limited and the government that states “each party agrees to keep the confidential Information confidential and not to disclose it to anyone without the consent of the other party” provided the information is marked as “confidential” (the actual confidentiality of the information does not matter – the key is that the pages are marked “confidential”).

Boom! Secrecy heaven.

Financial meltdowns can be secret

Nuclear Power Limited will be Snowy Hydro Limited on radioactive steroids. If the similar magnitude $2B to $12 billion blowout to Snowy 2.0 were to occur with Dutton’s (already understated) $331B Nuclear Power Program, the blowout could amount to trillions of public money burned up building reactors that may never be economically viable.

In that regard, ART Deputy President Britten-Jones may have made the most dangerous decision ever made by an administrative review body (even without reference to Dutton’s plans, it casts a secrecy blanket over $100B of annual government procurement).

As such, I’ve put my hand into my pocket and spent $6K initiating a Federal Court Appeal. This secrecy decision can’t be allowed to stand.

And in the meanwhile, we can all just wonder how many more billions Snowy 2.0 will cost us.

The LNP’s nuclear policy is working just fine

This post was originally published on Michael West.

Is pouring concrete a way of the rich getting richer? Vertical seawalls along the New South Wales coastline are extending the frontage of multi-million-dollar residential properties, while taking the beachfront away from the public. Marcus Reubenstein reports.

Post massive storm surges, and significant coastal erosion, in 2016 residents of Collaroy on Sydney’s northern beaches have been forced to endure a solution that many have dubbed the ugliest wall in Australia. A seven-metre-high vertical seawall has been erected along part of the beachfront between Collaroy and Narrabeen, the next beach north.

In addition to being an eyesore, it’s robbed locals of beachfront while enriching millionaire property owners by, in effect, substantially increasing the usable size of their properties.

The vertical concrete seawall has been erected at the original boundary of waterfront properties; in places, filling in land that was once a natural dune between the beach and the property. Now property owners are free to build pools and expansive grassed areas, leaving behind a public amenity boxed in by a massive concrete wall.   

The justification for vertical seawalls is that they hold back tidal swells protecting the properties and the coastline. Says Angus Gordon, former general manager of the Pittwater Council on Sydney’s northern beaches, “These seawalls are a brutalist solution from the past century. Furthermore, because they have a shelf life, they simply don’t work.”

He points out that seawalls eventually fail, citing events at iconic Manly and Bondi beaches as examples.

A highly respected coastal engineer with more than 50 years of experience, Gordon says a far simpler and more practical solution is in wide use across the world and in particular Queensland’s Gold Coast.

“Rock revetments are the obvious and inexpensive solution to erosion and they have been successfully used at Collaroy to the south of the current vertical walls, he says.”

A revetment is a sloping installation of rocks that can absorb major storm events while preventing erosion. “The beauty,” according to Gordon, “is that sand blows up into the revetment, natural vegetation grows, and you’re left with what looks like a dune that doesn’t destroy the natural aesthetic of the waterfront but the underlying rock revetment is there to protect properties if a major storm event occurs.

“Furthermore, revetments can be altered and reinforced, whereas once you’ve built a vertical seawall that’s it.

“You wouldn’t know it, but much of the Gold Coast coastline is protected by a rock revetment buried under the sandy beach and dunes that have been artificially built by pumping sand from offshore onto the beach.”  

While storm surges and beachfront sand erosion are still an issue on the Gold Coast there’s no proposals from any stakeholders to replace revetments with vertical seawalls. 

New South Wales residents hoodwinked

A major issue says Brendan Donohoe, president of the Northern Beaches Branch of the Surfrider Foundation is that self-interest is behind the push for vertical seawalls. “For councils and state government it’s buck-passing as local property owners are footing much of the bill for the seawalls,” he says.

“But an individual landowner contributing $250,000 to the building of a vertical seawall gives them an immediate return on investment as at least that amount is added to the value of their property. It’s a solution of protecting private properties at the expense of community space.”

Aside from its mission to preserve coastline, the Surfrider Foundation is campaigning against what it says is conflicted advice, with a number of waterfront property owners presented with the vertical concrete seawalls as the only option to protect their properties from ocean surges. 

At a meeting of owners of the Marquesas beachfront apartment complex in Narrabeen, recorded by one of the owners, a council officer was seen to be advocating for the construction of a vertical seawall. Aside from issues over its long-term effectiveness and impact on the beachfront landscape, it would also be a far more expensive option.  

Says Donohoe, “Owners were apparently being told a vertical wall had to be constructed and they would have to pay for it. Various alternatives, including sand nourishment, were not put to them.”

Silencing dissenting voices

Following changes to New South Wales planning laws, the state government has effectively pawned off the decision-making process, leaving the hard choices to be made by councils.

Says Gordon, “Local councils have incredibly high staff turnovers and council officers cannot keep up with changes, they are too easily swayed by outdated coastal engineering thinking, nor do they have any idea of the history of the coastal areas they are responsible for.”

It seems that lack of knowledge has come to play with coastal protection works at Wamberal on the New South Wales Central Coast. There are plans to build three sections of vertical seawalls and Gordon had been appointed to the NSW Planning Department panel to review the proposals.

He was removed from the panel, being informed in writing that, “It has been raised with us that you may have had some previous involvement in this project including media comments and presentation of material to the Save our Sands group and may therefore have a reasonably perceived conflict of interest.” 

In a written response, he hit back saying he had no conflict of interests, adding, “I believe this attempt to disqualify me is because I have been interested in coastal matters, including at Wamberal for 50 years. Hence, I have what could be seen to be an arguably unmatched knowledge of the issues at Wamberal and any proposal to undertake coastal works.” 

According to Gordon the issue was most likely that the panel was giving consideration to a seawall and did not want a dissenting voice coming from a prominent coastal engineer who might advocate a far less costly solution with significantly lesser impact on the environmental landscape.

The Surfrider Foundation has written to the planning panel asking it to confirm rumours that Gordon will be replaced by an engineer who may have a conflict of interest in advising on the seawall approvals. Whilst the panel hasn’t responded a proposed preliminary meeting, at which Gordon was originally listed to attend, has been cancelled. Says Gordon, “I believe the panel has all but fallen over, the whole process has been compromised.” 

More to come

In another baffling planning move, one of Sydney’s most iconic harbourside beaches has endured a two-and-a-half-year transformation that was billed as delivering Shark Beach at Nielsen Park an upgraded reinforced seawall. With cost and time blowouts, and the original engineering firm being sacked halfway into the project, the beach only reopened this month.

Now Shark Beach is missing one thing—a beach. At high tide the water is literally lapping at the base of the new seawall, beachgoers have been hived off onto concrete steps and a pristine piece of harbour foreshore has been destroyed. 

With poor planning, conflicted stakeholders and a lack of proper oversight, says Gordon, “it’s concrete by stealth,” that has the potential to engulf significant areas of the state’s coastline. 

Global warming’s huge and endless cost of rising seas

This post was originally published on Michael West.

Tax Office whistleblower, Richard Boyle, stripped of his defence by broken whistleblower laws, has entered plea deal with prosecutors to avoid a trial. Rex Patrick reports from the South Australian District Court.

Richard Boyle’s barristers have advised Judge Kudelka of the South Australian District Court that they are in negotiations with the Commonwealth Government to end his prosecution through a plea in exchange for, hopefully, a non-conviction.

Richard is a Whistleblower.

In June this year, Justice Lovell, with justices Doyle and David of the SA Court of Appeal agreeing, declared:

“The [ATO] accepts that the appellant is a whistle-blower as that term is commonly understood. [Richard] disclosed information to an authorised person pursuant to the terms of the Public Interest Disclosure Act. It was common ground on appeal that [Richard’s] conduct in disclosing the information attracted an immunity from criminal prosecution under the Act. [Richard], however, faces criminal charges, not for the disclosure of information he believed needed to be disclosed, but for his conduct in unlawfully gathering evidence he considered would support his disclosure …”

They went on to explain that Richard Boyle formally blew the whistle.

“It was common ground that [Richard], on 12 October 2017, lodged a public interest disclosure with the ATO and that it complied with the requirements of the Act. Information contained within the [disclosure] attracted the immunity.”

The Justices then confirmed the Australian Tax Office botched the processing of Richard’s disclosure.

“[Richard’s disclosure] was allocated to an authorised recipient for investigation pursuant to s 43 of the Act. His [disclosure] was not dealt with appropriately. By letter emailed to [Richard] on 27 October 2017, the authorised recipient advised that he had discontinued the investigation pursuant to s 48(1)(c) of the Act, having determined that the disclosure did not concern serious disclosable conduct. It is accepted for the purposes of this litigation that this decision was incorrect.”

Finally, they vindicated him:

“On 9 April 2018, the Australian Broadcasting Corporation (“ABC”) presented a story called ‘Mongrel bunch of bastards’ as a Four Corners program. It featured taxpayers talking about their adverse experiences with the ATO. [Richard] appeared as a whistle-blower.”

[SUPPRESSED]

“In March 2019, the Inspector-General of Taxation and Taxation Ombudsman released a ‘Review into the Australian Taxation Office’s use of Garnishee Notices’. The review was commenced “to maintain community confidence in the administration of the tax system after serious allegations were made about the [ATO’s] inappropriate use of garnishee notices on small businesses” by a current and former ATO officer on the ABC Four Corners program on 9 April 2018.”

But he was left without any protection as the Court of Appeal confirmed what everyone knew; Australia’s Commonwealth public sector whistleblower protection laws are broken.

https://michaelwest.com.au/the-making-of-a-criminal-from-a-whistleblower/ 

The Truth, The Whole Truth and Nothing But The Truth

Richard has never attempted to deny the actions that he took, rather to explain why he took them. It’s not that he’s now changing his story, just that his legal team recognises he has no legal defence.

Richard has reached the end of a very long road.

Despite him blowing the whistle on the egregious use of power by the Tax Office with an understanding that he was protected, he wasn’t. He’s been caught out by inadequate laws that purported to shield him, but instead lured him into a situation where he and his family has suffered for seven years.

A Failure to Act

Despite knowing that our whistleblower protection laws are broken, Attorney-General Mark Dreyfus let the prosecution of Richard continue.

At any time, Mr Dreyfus could have exercised his powers under the Judiciary Act to end the proceedings. The Attorney-General is given those powers by the Parliament, to whom he owes a duty to make sure unfair prosecutions do not occur.

In what will be a sad legacy for Mr Dreyfus, he failed to intervene. He knew the law was broken yet he let Richard be prosecuted under them.

Plea Deal

We’ll have to wait to see the outcome of the plea deal. Surely the Commonwealth will see that Richard acted only with the public interest in mind, as the Court of Appeal recognised.

A non-conviction would be best, with a non-custodial sentence the lesser preferred option. 

If he’s placed on a good behaviour bond, one might hope he can back date it – because all he has ever done is behaved in a manner we might hope others would in the same circumstances.

Richard is no criminal, rather a hero.

---

Editor: story to be updated as developments arise

Afghan war crimes whistleblower David McBride sentenced to prison

This post was originally published on Michael West.

It’s a $20B plus submarine mess, atop the well-known $368B AUKUS submarine mess-in-development. Rex Patrick lifts the lid on the little known financial and national security disaster that is the Collins Class submarines.

Last month, when The Australian reported that five of our six Collins Class submarine were out of action, the Chief of Navy, Admiral Mark Hammond, defended the subs, saying they remained “world class diesel boats” that were “meeting the operational requirements of the Australian government”.

It was a statement that was, at best, disingenuous.

What the admiral failed to say, and what is understood by few, perhaps not even by our bathtub admiral Defence Minister, is that Collins represents a more than $20B national security failure caused exclusively by incompetence.

A troubled life

The Collins submarines have been mired in controversy pretty much for all of their three-decade lives.

The Collins submarines were built in Adelaide between 1990 and 2003. They were plagued with problems at launch, not because of Australian build quality, but because Collins was a new design with a lot of teething issues.

“Dud subs” and “noisy as a rock concert” were labels attached to the submarine in 1998. The diesel engines were unreliable. Poor hydrodynamic design and propellor cavitation made the submarine noisy. The periscopes vibrated and the combat system didn’t work. 

After considerable sums of taxpayer’s money were spent rectifying issues, the submarines proved capable, but unreliable.

On 10 June 2011 the Government woke up to a headline in the Australian; “not a single submarine seaworthy”. Reliability issues started to plague the Collins submarines.

Only after a detailed and brutal investigation, the ‘Coles review’, did submarine availability improve, but again at huge cost to the taxpayer. In the mid 2010’s Collins sustainment costs shot to well over $500M per annum.

Sustainment issues then saw the Collins class submarine listed as a Project of Concern from November 2008 until October 2017.

Australia was paying the price, and it has been a very considerable price, of choosing to have an orphaned submarine design; a submarine that no other nation was using and for which there were no international pool of spare parts.

Present day issues

This year’s allocated budget for sustainment of our Collins submarines is a ‘wallet sapping’ $769M. And for that, we’ve got just one submarine available for operations.

That’s not a reliable or credible military capability.  

And whilst the Navy went into damage control when the current dire situation became public, this week Defence Industry Minister Pat Conroy placed the Collins submarines back on the Project of Concern List.

It is likely that the Collin-class will never come off that list. They’ll be on there until they are retired from service, and that could be sooner than the Navy would like and indeed potentially before their planned nuclear replacements are available.

Best laid plans o’ mice an’ men

Understanding the situation is not difficult. Anyone familiar with the life cycle of a car knows what Collins is going through.

When you first buy a car there’s a risk of infantile failure of components. The warranty period covers these failures. Then the car performs reliable for the next decade until wear-out failures start to kick in. That’s the point where most people dispose of the car.

There was a plan to rid the Navy of the Collins submarines before they hit the point where wear-out failures started to increase. It was a particularly important plan noting Australia was the only Collins spare parts source.

The first Collins submarine was supposed to retire in 2026.

Dunning-Kruger leadership at Defence

You do not have to be a scholar to work out that almost all of our Defence Force procurement screw-ups (and the list of screw-ups is long) start with a decision not to go with a low risk off-the-shelf solution.

And yet, that’s what happens over and over again. Defence leaders don’t look back and say, “what’s the key lesson from Defence procurement failures”, rather they think “I can do it better than the last guy”. It’s the Dunning-Kruger effect – a cognitive bias where people of limited ability in a particular domain, in this case project management, overestimate their abilities.

When the future submarine project was first announced in 2009, the plan was to have the first new submarine in the water by 2025, allowing the first Collins submarine to decommission in 2026.

Defence spent seven years from 2009 thinking it would embark on a risky ‘design your own Son-of-Collins’ project before announcing in 2016 that it would instead procure French nuclear submarines, converted into non-nuclear submarines.

Defence had injected 12 years of delay into a Collins submarine replacement and spent $4B buying nothing.

On the day the French submarine program was abandoned Defence had injected 12 years of delay into a Collins submarine replacement and spent $4B buying nothing.

Life-of-type-extension

Defence then recommended to Government that Australia embark on the $368B AUKUS program; a program that will unlikely ever see a delivery of a first US Virginia class submarine in 2035 as planned, and will most certainly not see a UK designed AUKUS submarine before 2040.

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

So, instead of decommissioning the first Collins submarine taxpayers will be hit with an additional $3B to $5B on a life-of-type extension (LOTE) for all six Collins boats. That cost estimate is from Defence and is a fantasy. 

In May this year former US navy deputy assistant secretary Gloria Valdez handed a report to the Government stating that LOTE was a perilously high-risk endeavour that is not guaranteed to succeed. The taxpayers will likely be up for double the Defence LOTE estimate and there’s a real risk we’ll get nothing from it.

MWM has an Information Commissioner appeal afoot to get access to the Valdez report, which Defence is keeping secret – even from ASC, the Government shipyard charged with carrying out the LOTE.

And while the LOTE is underway, taxpayers will still be paying close to $800 million per annum to strive to have our 1990 Holden VN Commodore era Collins submarines at sea. That’s another $8.8B of originally unplanned spend to take us up to the unlikely arrival of a first nuclear powered submarine. 

Meantime the risk of systemic failure for the Collins-class grows, raising the possibility that Australia could be left with no submarine capability at all.

Pure incompetence 

Pure incompetence by Defence leaders has led us to a point in 2024 where we have a circa $20B bill on the table for failing Collins class submarine availability, as we simultaneously spend even more in what is likely to be a failed effort to acquire nuclear submarine capability.

All of this spend is supposedly designed to give us the capability to contribute to a China-Taiwan conflict predicted by the United States to likely take place later this decade.

Leaving aside the question of whether this is a sensible focus for Australian Defence planning and capabilities; if this were Australian Football League, Defence would have us paying for the most expensive football team ever, with the players scheduled to arrive after the grand final has been played.

The Albanese Government has blindly swallowed Defence’s Kool Aid. It’s hard to know whether Defence has spiked the Kool Aid and everyone attending the National Security Committee of Cabinet is drunk, or whether they’re all just plain dumb. It could even be a combination.

Meantime at the sharp end of national security, Australia’s highly professional and capable submariners are condemned to go to sea in elderly boats that may soon be no longer fit for purpose and perhaps worse.  

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

This post was originally published on Michael West.

Peter Dutton’s hyperbolic denunciation of Australia reinforcing its existing policy on Palestine, along with most allies, attracts allegations of playing local politics. These claims miss the real dog whistle, writes Michael Pascoe. 

Nobody has ever accused Peter Dutton and his LNP of being subtle. When Australia voted in the UN with nearly every country other than the US and Israel for a pathway to the long-agreed two-state solution, no claim was too much for the headline-dominating opposition leader.

“They’ve completely abandoned the Jewish community, the state of Israel,” Dutton claimed. 

“I think the Prime Minister stands condemned because when you ask yourself, why would the government, why would the Prime Minister sacrifice his credibility and backflip on the commitment he gave?

“It’s for votes. He sold the Jewish community out in this country for green votes in western Sydney and in places like Marrickville.

“That’s what the Prime Minister’s done and I think we should be standing with allies like the United States.”

And Micronesia, Palau and Paraguay?

BREAKING: Today, the United Nations voted 170-6 on “The Right of the Palestinian People to Self-Determination”.

Those voting against:

🇺🇸United States
🇮🇱Israel
🇦🇷Argentina
🇵🇾Paraguay
🇫🇲Micronesia
🇳🇷Nauru pic.twitter.com/VpKEiWKnFG

— Alan MacLeod (@AlanRMacLeod) November 14, 2024

There are a number of false claims in this Trumpy spray ranging from the major, such as making up the idea that the government had given a commitment against actually backing the two-state solution, to the minor, such as saying “allies”, plural, instead of “ally”, singular. The US is the only ally we didn’t vote with on that particular motion. 

The Opposition leader is a bit rich in claiming Labor slowly moving in step with the rest of the civilised world (allowing some licence about whether the US is “civilised” in regards to Gaza or where it’s heading under Trump) is all about courting Green and Muslim votes.

All about the votes

As if Dutton’s own policy positions on everything from the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders’ flags to his nuclear gaslighting aren’t all about votes. 

The quality of Australian politics being the quality of Australian politics, Labor of course also does nothing without a view to the votes, how far the electorate will let it move after the disaster of the Voice referendum. 

What is missed in commentary is what votes Peter Dutton is concentrating on.

You don’t have to look very far on social media to find as many allegations of Dutton’s unreserved support of Netanyahu being all about chasing the supposed Jewish vote and financial support as Albanese chasing Green and Muslim votes. 

You’ll also see a simple arithmetic promoted that there are roughly 800,000 Australians saying they are Islamic and 100,000 saying they are Jewish. Very simplistically, those numbers would pretend Dutton is being brave and Albanese obvious. 

Albo and the Labor base

But these are not the votes that it’s about.

Albanese is trying to stem the erosion of faith in the Labor base. 

Dutton is dog whistling his preference for “white” over “brown” to build his hard-right base. If it helps a bit against the Teals in the seats of Wentworth and Goldstein, that’s just a bonus. 

It’s not the 800,000 Muslims, even if they were politically uniform, that Albanese is chasing. It’s the millions who wanted Labor to act on principle, to restore the nation’s sovereignty instead of giving it away. 

It’s not the 100,000 Jews, who certainly are not politically uniform, that Dutton is focussed on. It’s the millions who bark when he whistles on African gangs, Aboriginal flags, boat people, “Chinah”.

Brown v white

He never has to say it out loud. His people see Palestinians and Lebanese as “brown” and Israelis as “white”.

Backing the Netanyahu government all the way and then a bit further is what Peter Dutton says out loud. What he whistles is that he’s 100 per cent for white people in any conflict with brown or black.

That’s why it helps to conflate Jewish people in Australia with the Israeli Government, the good white people we know with colonialists killing scores of thousands of natives.

There was something similar in Dutton’s earlier stance of wanting to preference white South African farmers if they were to seek refugee status. They were the LNP’s sort of people, white, unlike all those other refugees. 

And it’s working for him. The division brought to the surface in the Voice campaign is his guiding light. That 60 per cent who voted “no” weren’t all racists but plenty were, a majority safely suspected of being opposed to “woke”, whatever that is, a majority dismissive of the pantomime elites Dutton suggests, a majority opposed to “pronouns”, as Dutton euphemistically summarised a culture war.

It is a body of people who might be led to think renewable energy is an unnecessary fixation of those rich, woke, pronoun-diverse, city elites, if the LNP can spin its illusion of having a cheaper, easier, quicker nuclear-powered solution. Only woke greenies would oppose such a thing. 

Dutton competing with Trump to be Netanyahu’s biggest supporter is consistent with the rest of the package, the inherent dog whistle as solidly LNP as coal mining. 

That’s what is generally missed. It’s old Australia, unrenovated, happy to bark.  

This post was originally published on Michael West.

Young Australians are subject to powerful indoctrination and enticements to join the Israel Defence Forces. Yaakov Aharon investigates the links between youth group Hatzofim Australia and IDF recruiters. 

While the Scouts typically wear a uniform emblazoned with the flag of their own country, Hatzofim Australia’s khaki uniform only has the Israeli flag. It’s a not-for-profit Zionist youth group and a wing of the Israeli Scouts.

Recently, MWM published an investigation into the Garin Tzabar Australia program, whose staff and services are closely intertwined with Hatzofim Australia. The Garin Tzabar program is the result of a joint venture partnership between the Israeli Scouts and IDF’s recruitment unit.

Hatzofim Australia provides services to children aged 8-25 and is granted special access to children through public and private Jewish schools. Their services include teaching classes and school activities, hosting regular weekend meetings and camps during school holidays, and sending children on Israel study tours.

Sometimes these Israel study tours are a one way trip. After all, Garin Tzabar translates to ‘seeds of Israeli identity’, and seeds are meant to be buried. Israeli immigrants who show they are willing to die for a foreign country are then enticed to stay for a lifetime.

Lone Soldiers. New Australian IDF recruits due to arrive in Israel in January

Criminal army recruiting

It is not a crime if an Australian chooses to join a foreign army.

However, S119.7 of the Commonwealth Criminal Code Act 1995 states that “a person commits an offence if the person recruits, in Australia, another person to serve in any capacity in or with an armed force in a foreign country.”

It is a further offence to facilitate or promote recruitment for a foreign army and to advertise or publish recruitment materials. This includes information relating to how a person may serve, make applications to serve, or travel to a foreign country to serve with a foreign armed force.

The maximum penalty for each offence is ten years. MWM is not alleging any parties mentioned in this article have broken the law.

Hatzofim and IDF common goal

Hatzofim Australia is the local wing of the Israeli Scouts. Its mission statement says it intends to…

“to operate and develop educational programs and values, in which children and young adults – members of the Jewish-Israeli community in North America, Australia and Western Europe – will engage in a variety of social and educational Zionist experiences, which will help them build knowledge of and love for the Land of Israel. Weekly activities are planned and executed by high school children leading kids grades 3-9.

… [Hatzofim Members] take a meaningful part in Israeli society through our different programs, such as Shnat Sherut [national service volunteer work] Gap Year program and Garin Tzabar IDF service.”

Garin Tzabar is a program for Israel’s Lone Soldiers, or soldiers without parents living in Israel, who qualify for special benefits, including free accommodation, free plane tickets to Israel, better pay for their IDF service, and more time on leave. When they finish their service, they qualify for subsidised accommodation and university scholarships.

The official IDF website states that Garin Tzabar was founded through a joint venture partnership with the Israeli Scouts, the IDF Metav Unit for recruitment, and the Ministries of Defence and Immigration.

Recruiting Australians

The Garin Tzabar website specifically advertises to Australian recruits.

Prior to an MWM investigation into Garin Tzabar, the contact point was listed as Shoval Magal. Her LinkedIn listed her as ‘Executive Director Hatzofim Australia & Garin Tzabar Australia.’

MWM reached out to Magal on multiple occasions through multiple avenues, seeking clarification as to how Magal separates her two roles and at what age Hatzofim’s children are exposed to advertisements for Garin Tzabar’s services.

Magal did not respond to requests for comment, however she did scrub references to Garin Tzabar from her LinkedIn and Hatzofim Australia’s website. Magal was preceded in her Executive Director roles by Michael Manhaim (2018-2023), who continues to live in Australia, where he works as the Growth and Marketing Lead for Tzofim Tzabar Olami (Israeli Scouts and Garin Tzabar International).

Manhaim was also a leading organiser in the 2024 Better Council pro-Israel election campaign. During his army service, Manhaim served in Sayeret Matkal, Israel’s most elite Special Forces unit.

Just ‘Rubbish & Rates’, or is the Israel war lobby interfering in Australia’s local elections?

In his former role as the ‘Shaliach [Emissary] and Executive Director of Hatzofim and Garin Tzabar Australia’, Manhaim wrote an article, ‘Becoming A Lone Soldier’, for an Australian Zionist youth group’s newsletter:

“How can we be Zionists but choose to live in the diaspora? While some will continue to live with this dilemma, some choose to take action. The Israeli Defence Force is the melting pot of Israeli society.

“The program starts with the unique preparation process in Australia.

…It only takes one step; you just need to choose which foot will lead the way. We will be there for the rest.”

Hatzofim Australia

In November 2021, Manhaim posted an advertisement for a job at Hatzofim Australia. The responsibilities included “maintaining mailing lists” for Garin Tzabar and “liaising with Tzofim Garin Tzabar and partners.”

When his 5-year contract as Emissary and Executive Director had finished in 2023, Manhaim wrote a lengthy farewell to those he worked with, reminiscing on how the Australian Zionist Youth Council coordinated with him to:

“Assist dozens of community members who made Aliyah [immigrated] to Israel.

Garin Tzabar [is] undoubtedly the most excellent Zionist enterprise of the 21st century. Young olim [immigrants] who choose to make Israel their home, influence Israeli society from within, and dedicate their best years to defending the land. I’m proud that a program fully supports these inspiring young people.

… To our partners in the Garin Tzabar: the Ministry of Aliyah [Immigration] and absorption, the Jewish Agency, the Israeli Consulate, the IDF Unit “Metav,” the Ministry of Defense.

… Thanks to everyone.”

IDF Service

During her time in the army, Magal worked as an ‘education guide’ for soldiers, but she did not teach them target shooting, fitness, or battle tactics. A job listing on an IDF e-store site describes Magal’s role as teaching the soldiers about Israeli culture, history, and ideology.

There is a concept in Zionism of ‘Hagshama’: that it is the responsibility of all Jews living outside of Israel to ‘actualise’ their ideology by making Aliyah (immigrating).

Some organisations – like the Israeli scouts – take it a step further. An Israeli immigrant of fighting age must respond to the conscription mandate. Therefore, Israeli Scouts ‘rank’ their members according to age groups. Those aged 17 to 18 are addressed as ‘Magshimim’ (‘actualizers’), both in Israel, where their members are subject to the draft and also abroad.

Prior to having scrubbed their website of references to Garin Tzabar, the first words on Hatzofim’s Hagshama page were an endorsement of the program.

Mapping the networks

Every Hatzofim Australia newsletter provides a link, “DONATE NOW – 100% of your donations go to Israel.” The link goes to the Friends of Hatzofim page, a secondary Australian non-profit, where visitors are asked to ‘Give $10,000 – Support a lone soldier full scholarship throughout the entire program.’ The tax-deductible donations are then sent overseas to Tzofim-Garin Tzabar.

The address of Hatzofim Australia and of Tzofim-Garin Tzabar in Australia is the building belonging to NSW Jewish Board of Deputies and the Zionist Council of NSW, the Jewish community’s peak roof bodies in the state.

Michael Gencher is a director of Hatzofim Australia and also served as acting CEO of the NSW Jewish Board of Deputies from 2023-2024.

Hatzofim Australia is overseen, alongside nine other Zionist youth groups, by the roof body Australian Zionist Youth Council (AZYC), which is in turn represented and overseen by the peak body Zionist Federation of Australia (ZFA).

MWM sought comment from AZYC and ZFA regarding their responsibilities for their constituent organisations, but we did not receive a reply.

The Zionist dream

In August 2020, Michael Manhaim congratulated four Australians who had become IDF recruits through the Garin Tzabar program. He wrote:

“There is nothing more powerful than fulfilling a Zionism dream!
…Those young adults are joining today to the Garin Tzabar program.
…‘For you are about to cross the Jordan to enter and possess the land that your God is assigning to you.’ Deuteronomy 11:31”

In November 2023’s Hatzofim newsletter, Shoval Magal is smiling for a selfie. She is standing next to six Australians who look barely out of high school. “The participants are eager to have Aliya [immigrate] to Israel, start the program and join the army,” Magal said.

These six recruits are the attendees of just one of several seminars that Magal has organised in Melbourne for the summer 2023 cycle, having also organised separate events across multiple cities in Australia.

In Hatzofim Australia’s June 2024 newsletter, Magal said she was “in the advanced stages of the preparation phase in Australia for the August 2024 Garin.” In October 2024, she was “getting ready for Garin Tzabar’s 2024 December cycle.”

The Israeli welcome ceremony for Garin Tzabar participants is on January 12, 2025.

The Government’s response

MWM sought comment from the Australian Federal Police, Australian Border Force, and the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade.

Only the Department of Home Affairs spokesperson, Tarek Al Issawi, was willing to respond. He said:

• “The Australian Government is alert to the potential for Australians to travel to Israel and the Occupied Palestinian Territories and engage in hostilities.
  • The Australian Government does not track the movement of Australians overseas.

• The Government encourages all Australians who seek to serve with the armed forces of a foreign country to carefully consider their legal obligations and ensure their conduct does not constitute a criminal offence.”

In July, Home Affairs stated it had identified only four Australians whom it suspects of having travelled to Israel since October 2023 with the intention of serving in the IDF. The Australian Border Force intervened with three of the four persons but did not necessarily prevent them from leaving.

This post was originally published on Michael West.

Among the 30 bills elbowed through in the Parliamentary rush were 3 bills agreed by the Government and Opposition targeting refugees. Human rights lawyer Alison Battison says Australia is criminalising refugees. 

In the last Parliamentary session of 2024, the Labor Party pushed through over 30 pieces of legislation, including three bills targeting refugees, asylum seekers, stateless and non-citizen Indigenous people. This rushed suite of legislation was not drafted in response to any pressing concern of national importance. 

Instead, it’s overriding purpose was and is to secure votes, so Labor can claim they are even more strict on border control and community safety than the Coalition. The legislation, however, does not address these areas in any cohesive manner. Instead, it creates great uncertainty for thousands of people who are worried they will be ripped away from their families and homes, detained and removed to places they have never been and have no connection to.

Just weeks before this suite of legislation was passed, I had self-funded travel to the UN in Geneva for meetings with the UN Working Group on Arbitrary Detention (WGAD). The WGAD is a specialist body within the Human Rights Council and the General Assembly.

The WGAD personally invited me to address them and civil society on developments in Australia regarding the arbitrary detention of refugees, asylum seekers, stateless and non-citizen Indigenous people in Australia’s immigration prisons. 

These are the very people the new suite of legislation targets. Being a legal expert in this area I have submitted scores of complaints to the WGAD over the years. 

A bad record 

Australia has a terrifying record of its treatment of these vulnerable people, in particular for the conditions of, and length of time refugees and others are subject to administrative detention. I have clients who were detained for over 10 years, with the longest being over 13 years.

This is administrative detention at the whim of the Government, the administrative equivalent of being detained at the “Governor’s pleasure.”

Despite a landmark judgment handed down in November 2023, which finally set down the Constitutionally permitted limits of administrative detention, I was at the UN to inform them that situation had not dramatically improved and was likely to deteriorate further.

The legislation has unfortunately proven my point

The passing of the suite of legislation (meant to address the fall out of the 2023 High Court decision) has unfortunately proven my point.

I told the UN and civil society that instead of pro-actively identifying detainees caught by the High Court judgment who should have been released immediately, the Government had left it up to lawyers such as myself to find and identify such people in the detention network and then threaten legal action for unlawful imprisonment.

Many unlawfully imprisoned  

More than 12 months later, I am still identifying multiple people every month who are unlawfully imprisoned, including very vulnerable young and queer people. 

Given their detention is a breach of our Constitution, this is a terrible indictment of the Australian Government’s commitment to our separation of powers. I had expected better of a Labor Government and had expected they would reduce the ease at which people could be administratively detained. I was wrong.

I told civil society (to audible gasps) that Australia’s immigration prisons are not centres in which a person can come and go – they are prisons with high levels of security and monitoring, with razor wire, internal movement restrictions and handcuffing if anyone needs to leave, including for medical or legal appointments. 

Distressingly, the new suite of legislation includes measures to further limit the contact people have with the outside world, by allowing guards (who are presumedly not trained in forensic analysis) to confiscate, check and ban phones from people they believe are committing crimes.

There is no need for suspicion “beyond reasonable doubt”

I told the UN that when people are released, they are fitted with electronic monitoring ankle devices and are subject to nighttime curfews. If they breach their visa conditions, they are liable for 12 months minimum prison time. 

These people, where they have criminal convictions, have already served their terms of imprisonment and are subject to the same monitoring as any other person in Australia. Their treatment is the very definition of criminalising immigration.

They are tagged like cattle for administrative, not criminal, purposes.  

The same suite of legislation also makes it lawful for the Australian Government to pay other countries to take these people, and if the person doesn’t assist with their removal to a place they have never been, they are liable for another round of administrative detention. 

This means that Australia, a wealthy Western country has legislated to use taxpayer funds to pay poorer nations to take the people our Government deems too unworthy to be in our country – including mothers of young children with no criminal records.

Convict history repeating  

Given Australia’s history as the place the British Empire sent its convicts, the people it didn’t want, this move is the height of hypocrisy. 

Some of my ancestors are Luddites and were sent to Australia for their political crimes. They were unwanted and inconvenient in their homeland. History is repeating itself. 

The legislation to send refugees to other nations is built on the “Pacific Solution”, in which Australia sent thousands for regional processing to Nauru and Manus Island, PNG. The irony of this is that remote processing in remote prisons has not stopped irregular migration – it does not address the push factors that cause people to leave their homes. It doesn’t work. 

Useless legislation feeds private contractors

And there is no evidence that the new legislation will work either. Instead, Australia is merely feeding the billion-dollar industry of publicly funded private contracts – it is Australia’s own industrial prison complex.

I am fielding scores of calls from petrified people who worry they and their families will be pulled apart by the new legislation. People with Australian citizen partners and young children. People with no criminal record. 

There appears to be no human right the Government won’t trample on in its race to prove its potentially vote winning cruelty has no bounds.

The WGAD is coming to Australia in 2025. The Government has already delayed its visit due to the forthcoming election. When they eventually arrive, I can’t imagine I will be providing the UN with an update that is anything but a rendition of the steps taken to win votes by victimising some of the most vulnerable in the Australian community.

Room at the Inn: yet Australia’s asylum seekers face another Christmas in lockdown

This post was originally published on Michael West.

It’s a $368B project getting deserved criticism, with a new negative angle hitting the press almost daily. But in the interests of balanced reporting, Rex Patrick brings us a little bit of good AUKUS news.

It’s only been a week since MWM gave readers an update on the current status of AUKUS. 

Since that time we’ve seen some further damning headlines out of the US – “The Navy’s Virginia-Class Submarine Debacle”, “The Virginia-class Submarines Struggle Under a 139 Percent Cost Increase” and a concerning article on “Why Is the Virginia-Class So Behind?”

And there’s been bad news in Australia too. There was the story of the Australian Submarine Agency scoring second worst for staff wellbeing in the annual public service census working alongside highly paid consultants, calls for a change of plan by a former submarine admiral, and news of a review of the project by former Defence Secretary Dennis Richardson.

Watching AUKUS unfold is a lot like watching a slow-motion shipwreck. But doomscrolling can sometimes be too much. So, here at MWM we’ve been on the watch for a good story; something to make everyone feel a bit better. It’s taken a while, but we found one.

On Time Delivery

When the Prime Minister went to San Diego in March 2023 to commit in full to AUKUS, President Biden presented him with a Shinola wristwatch in a custom wooden box. It’s a nice watch, American made.

Now, MWM want to be really clear in saying that Anthony Albanese declared the watch as a gift and he’s done everything right in respect to the official ‘Guidelines relating to official gifts received’ that apply to him and his ministers.

Under the gifts received policy, ministers are allowed to keep a gift from a foreign government whose wholesale value is less than $750. If it’s more than that it can also be kept if the minister pays the difference between the $750 and the value of the gift (plus GST).

Records show that Albanese rarely keeps gifts from foreign governments. He normally surrenders them to his department. But in this case, he obviously took a shine to the presidential watch and elected to keep it.

Its wholesale value was estimated at $1,122.88 (of course, President Biden gifting the watch probably makes its resale value somewhat higher). In accordance with the rules Albanese duly paid $410.17 to consolidated revenue, which included some GST.

MWM is not trying to make a big deal of the gift. Good on Albanese – he’s got himself an AUKUS watch (and care of Scomo whose deal it was originally). But it is worthy of mention in this project already mired by schedule blowouts and cost blowouts. 

The watch is the first AUKUS deliverable and it’s an on-time delivery. And in contrast to the submarines, at least this bit of American technology was free.

But then again, there’s no such thing as a free watch.

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

This post was originally published on Michael West.

Indonesia and Australia are preparing to ink a deal to send the remaining five of the ‘Bali Nine’ back to Australia. But do they all want to go? Duncan Graham reports from Malang prison in Java.

One of the Bali Five, Martin Stephen, faces a dilemma worthy of a Shakespearean plot.

After almost two decades in overstuffed prisons with men whose values and language he spurns, the 48-year-old prisoner is in Lowokwaroe jail (Malang, East Java) and suddenly getting a mash of messages. So are his four former mates who are locked up in Bali.

Their hopes for an early release were – at least temporarily – dashed this week when Home Affairs Minister Tony Burke met his Indonesian counterpart Yusril Ihza Mahendra. They told journos in Jakarta that neither nation has prisoner transfer laws, so more talks are needed.

Lowokwaroe’s Kasi Bimkemas Lapas (Head of Community Relations) Faishol Nur refused MWM access to prisoner Stephens, referring requests to the Australian Embassy: “He’s only just heard of the deal, so is still trying to decide. The news hasn’t been confirmed.”

‘Significant step’ in push to repatriate Bali Nine

Uncertainty abounds

The yes-no stress on the men and their families in Oz must be acute. And Stephens has an add-on quandary: If the black-letter lawyers contrive a solution, should he stay with his Javanese wife – or head home to his parents in Wollongong and never again see Christine Winarni Puspayanti?

He may have no choice but to be forced to leave under the headline deal brokered by Anthony Albanese with President Prabowo Subianto. If deported, could Christine, 47, follow and settle? Maybe – but it’ll take a labyrinth of bureaucracy and a hill of cash to overcome, for he already owes thousands to the Australian government for jail support.

If he’s released on parole in Australia, will Indonesia allow re-entry? It seems that boarding gate may be forever closed. Minister Yusril reportedly said:

We’re transferring them to their countries so they can serve their sentence there, but if the countries want to give amnesty … it’s their right.

These crims could have been out long ago had they been cuffed on Australian tarmac as the Boeing’s turbines cooled. The Feds knew the conspirator’s plans and were tagging closely. But they could not arrest them before they left, and instead, they were arrested at Ngurah Rai airport en route back to Australia with much more dire consequences.

Martin Stephens

Stephens was originally recruited by Andrew Chan and Myuran Sukumaran. They offered the naïve barman an all-expenses holiday and a slice of the expected $4m from selling the drug stash Down Under.

All were tried and convicted for carrying 8.3 kg of heroin. The ringleaders got death – their male mules’ life. The only woman, Renae Lawrence, was deported in 2018. The remaining four are in Bali’s Kerobokan Prison. Stephens was shifted in 2014 to Lowokwaroe in East Java – he says to be closer to Christine.

In a 2020 face-to-face with this journalist, Stephens said: “I did wrong. Smuggling was my big mistake. I’m asking for a second chance. I’d never been convicted before of any crime. Christine is struggling. My parents in Australia are doing it hard because of me. I want to care for them (they visited last year).

Why should they keep paying for my first fault? What’s served by keeping me behind bars? I can do more good warning of the dangers of drugs.

“I’m borderline autistic. That caused problems when I was a kid. Now I’m more mature. I’ve learned the hard way. I got out of my depth. I’ve always taken responsibility for my mistakes. I’m proud of that.”

Stephens, the self-styled ‘baby’ of the Bali Nine, met Christine when she was visiting as a part of a church group, and they married in 2011. Jail staff say, “he’s got fat and has become spiritual.”

The five are serving life for crimes that would have put them inside for maybe a decade had they faced Australian courts. A courier with an otherwise clean record and uninvolved in planning would likely get under ten years, with half spent on probation.

Prisoners plight

It’s hard to find much public sympathy for the prisoner’s plight but reasonable observers may say the men have done their time. They weren’t only casualties of greed and stupidity, but they were victims of police stuff-ups and Indonesian politics – in the wrong country at a tricky time.

A hot ‘Say No to Drugs’ crusade was flaring across the Archipelago when the gang was caught; huge street billboards hammered the English-language slogan propped by pix of stern politicians and police chiefs.

A National Narcotics Agency (Badan Inteligensi Nasional – BIN) claim that 33 users were dying daily went largely unchallenged by the media. It was a pluck-from-anywhere figure.

Into this contrived moral morass tumbled the Bali Nine. Their well-publicised arrests were supposed to intimidate and deter. Nothing changed – new traders filled the gap; they calculated the odds of getting caught, shrugged and carried on recruiting the desperate and expendable.

In one year, 39 death sentences for drug-related offences were handed down by judges basking in public applause. The intensity and acceptance of the BIN crusade suggest a new legal approach is unlikely. Amnesty International campaign manager Puri Kencana Putri wrote that this accounted for

a staggering 81 per cent of all new death sentences.

By comparison, only 17 per cent were for murder, and the remaining two per cent for terrorism.”

Yet Indonesia is creeping towards abolition. Last year, the kill squads reportedly had more than 500 on the wait list, but their M16s have been on safety since 2016. A new law converts an extreme sentence to life if the wicked one has been contrite and well-behaved for two years.

Clemency pleas

Clemency pleas by Stephens were flicked aside by former president Joko ‘Jokowi’ Widodo. He had no tough-guy military background and perhaps needed to impress the electorate. His successor, former military strongman Prabowo Subianto, doesn’t need a status boost, hence the deportation deal.

Indonesia has a new President. Should we be worried?

Lowokwaroe Prison, where Stephens is held, was built by the Dutch in 1918 and later enlarged to hold 1,300 men. The roll call is now 2,649. Faishol Nur says the Australian has his own cell while locals are packed up to 20 in a room. In the earlier interview, Stephens said the Malang jail was “100 per cent better” than Kerobokan prison in Bali, where the other four remain.

Also known as Hotel K, the Bali clink was designed for 300 but holds five times more, mainly drug offenders. A gang riot in 2015 that spilt outside left four dead.

“I have no complaints about the Australian government and the AFP, which saved my life,” Stephens said in the earlier interview. “If I’d been caught in Sydney and confessed, the drug syndicate would have had me killed.

“I teach English and play the seruling (traditional bamboo flute), but I haven’t learned Indonesian. I want to keep my Australian identity and avoid getting involved in faction fighting.”

Stephens said his family and faith sustain him: “I’ve never contemplated suicide. That’s not me. No one sees your struggles – only your errors. Doesn’t everyone deserve a second chance?”

 

BRICS and Bats: the global world order is changing, but who would know?

 

This post was originally published on Michael West.

Will the government save in a fuel security emergency? After a long FOI fight, the Federal Government’s plan has been made public, and it’s not comforting, Rex Patrick reports.

After a year-long $150K Freedom of Information (FOI) fight to keep secret their plans for dealing with a fuel security emergency, the Australian Government has been forced to come clean and hand them over. Should we be reassured or alarmed?

There’s no single fuel emergency scenario. Australian Governments rightly ‘wargame’ all sorts of possibilities to see how they, the Australian economy and people might cope with a major disruption of liquid fuel supplies. Australia still predominantly runs on petroleum products, without which our nation would come to a crashing halt.

State-based fuel emergency

If the pipeline between the Gore Bay Marine Terminal, west of the Sydney Harbour Bridge, and the storage tanks at Clyde near Parramatta that feed the nearby road tanker loading facilities were to fail, there would be fuel disruption across the greater Sydney metropolitan area and the State.

This would be an emergency that would engage the NSW Minister for Energy, who has extensive powers under the Energy and Utilities Administrative Act (NSW), and the NSW Department of Planning and Environment, keepers of the Petroleum Supply Disruption Response Plan. The Commonwealth Government might keep a watching brief on the State’s response, and offer assistance where required, but would not formally get involved.

Each State and Territory has their own fuel security legislation and response plans.

National fuel emergency

Only if there was a pending or actual nationwide shortage would the Federal Government step up and take charge.

A range of scenarios exist, mostly external, that could cause a national issue. A scenario in the 2019 Fuel Security emergency report the Government wanted kept from us gave a plausible scenario: a developing conflict in the Middle East where ships were being attacked in the Straits of Hormuz – at the end of an intense Australian bushfire season at which domestic fuel stocks were depleted.

A read of the 82-page ‘National Liquid Fuel Emergency Response Plan’, which is now finally public, tells the planned response story.

Empty tanks and bare shelves. Australia’s fuel and supply security exposed

Light handed measures

At the outset of a crisis, the public would start to hear of an unfamiliar new acronym – NOSEC.  The National Oil Supplies Emergency Committee, chaired by the Commonwealth but including State government officials and large fuel suppliers such as Ampol, BP, Viva (formerly Shell) and ExxonMobil, would meet up and make an initial assessment of the situation.

The response may start off in a light-handed manner. Officials and their political masters would likely seek information on the supply situation and try to avoid startling the horses. Let’s not start a panic would be the mantra.

Rising prices caused by reduced supply will cause a market response whereby less fuel is used. The Government estimates this may cause a 4-6% reduction in consumption.

The Government may also start eco-driving (website information on reducing fuel usage), car-pooling and public transport campaigns.

The ACCC may authorise fuel companies to co-ordinate activities and to give priority to certain customers (normally a breach of the Trade Practices Act, until an emergency has been declared). They would also commence intense monitoring of retail fuel prices against international prices to discourage and, if necessary, prevent price gouging.

Alert phase

Whilst the Government’s preference would be to let industry respond, it may eventually be necessary to invoke powers under the Commonwealth’s Liquid Fuel Emergency (LFE) Act.

Quiet preparation will take place to do this. Consultation with stakeholders will occur. It may be that the states, coordinated through NOSEC to ensure an integrated approach, invoke their own fuel emergency powers first.

The Federal government will watch to see how light-handed market measures and any state responses are working and how the international circumstances that caused the supply issues are playing out. Oficials will advise and prepare for LFE implementation, allocating and placing resources on standby while preparing necessary legal documents and media releases.

State ministers must be consulted (a legal requirement under the LFE Act) before a fuel emergency can be declared.

If Australia experienced a decline in fuel supplies of more than 7 per cent and this decline was not global (e.g. a significant natural disaster), Australia may also consider the merit of drawing on its rights as a member of the International Energy Agency (IEA) to seek additional petroleum supplies from other IEA member countries, if available and feasible.

Hard measures

Once an emergency is declared and announced through the media, other measures may kick in. 

The LFE Act overrides any State measures in play to the extent that they are inconsistent with national measures. The LFE Act allows the government to direct fuel refinery products and quantity outputs. That may have only limited effect as we have only two refineries now. 

All participants in the fuel supply chain may have minimum stock requirements placed on them and be required to provide the government with near-real-time fuel stock data. This would be used to prevent excessive drawdowns.

A temporary reduction in fuel standards to assist with supply may also be considered.

Fuel distribution would be controlled by the Federal Government to ensure even distribution and to direct fuels to certain priority customers. It would likely invoke fuel rationing, e.g. $40 of fuel per customer per day, or odd licence plates one day, evens the next. This would involve an associated media campaign to ensure consumers understood the rules, as per example below.

If the situation worsens, fuels could be directed to particular users: Defence, ships, transport vehicles, police/ambulance/fire, corrective services, public transport, state emergency services and health.

The government co-ordination requirements would be considerable: intra-government (Attorney Generals, ACCC, Agriculture and Water, Communications, Industry, jobs and small business, Defence, Home Affairs, Social Security, DFAT, PM&C, Treasury and Finance), inter-government and with industry.

Media will be engaged to announce the declaration and to keep the nation informed of measures.

There is a plan, but…

The Government has a plan in place. It’s now public, which means it’s available to the media in the event of a looming crisis (to assist in informing the public), and for others to scrutinise. The response to a fuel security emergency requires advanced planning and coordination. The Government has good planning documentation in place.

But the release of the documents, including a 2019 fuel emergency exercise report, reveals some concerning issues that the Government does not seem to have got on top of.

In a 2019 exercise report, it was revealed that it might take 21 days to declare an emergency.

That concern has to be understood in the context of typical in-country diesel supplies of 24 to 26 days. It’s not clear how the government estimated that period, but it’s hugely problematic.

It may be an accumulation of the need to approach a crisis in an iterative manner, determined by legislative requirements, the number of Federal agencies involved, the number of stakeholders beyond the Federal government, a lack of clear understanding of the roles and responsibilities of the various players, the lack of clear guidance on the order things ought to be done and a lack of clear thresholds for steps to be taken.

In April 2019, the Morrison Government announced a review of the LFE Act to address the issues with the LFE Act. However, the review of the LFE Act did not proceed beyond scoping and planning because it was overtaken by events, mainly the COVID-19 pandemic. Nothing seems to have happened under the Albanese government. It’s quite focussed on AUKUS, it would seem.

One must presume this 21-day implementation timeframe still exists and that’s a big vulnerability while our national fuel stocks remain so low.

Panic stations?

Another deficiency in planning is the presumption that Australians will act rationally if a fuel emergency commences. COVID toilet paper hoarding showed us that citizens acting rationally is not to a given.

If diesel were to run out, food would quickly run out. We have just over a week of dry goods consumption available at our supermarkets and about a week for chilled and frozen foods. Pharmacies will start running out of medicine in about a week.

The thought of not having food in cupboards and fridges or prescription medicines would likely exercise people’s minds a lot more than not having toilet paper.

The planning needs to consider this and clearly doesn’t.

Fuel security is an important national security issue. The most recent forced release of information under our FOI laws shows that on top of the limited supplies we have in-country at any time, we’re likely to have a three-week delay before full response measures can be put in place.

But by that time, the bulk of our national buffer may already be depleted. Things could turn ugly fast and rapidly move beyond the scenarios the Federal and State governments have war-gamed.  

But it’s not obvious anyone cares. It’s not just a muck-up; it’s an inexcusable national security failure for which we could all pay a heavy price in troubled and uncertain times.

Forget toilet paper — try no food, fuel or medicine. Why Canberra needs to act on fuel security

 

This post was originally published on Michael West.