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

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

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

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

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

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

Port becomes political football but is ‘not for sale’

A Trumpian stench

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

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

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

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

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

Cheap politics

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

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

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

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

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

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

A simple concrete thing

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Chinese spies, ports and Donald | Scam of the Week

This post was originally published on Michael West.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Insecure and unsecured

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Bad decisions by ART

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

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

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

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

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

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

Sports Rorts precedent

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

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

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

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

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

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

High public interest

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

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

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

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

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

A waste of money

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

This post was originally published on Michael West.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Populist sugar hit

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

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

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

Fair call. 

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

One good idea

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Inflation

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Housing

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

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

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

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

And it may work well for him. 

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

This post was originally published on Michael West.

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

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

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

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

Defying the ICJ

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

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

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

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

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

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

Breaching the ICJ energy embargo

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

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

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

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

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

The report concludes:

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

Colombia setting example

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

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

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

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

Australia taking advantage

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

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

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

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

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

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

Adjusting ‘arms and ammunition’ definition

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Export permits

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Hiding behind semantics

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

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

By all appearances,s Australia has effectively tried to:

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

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

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

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

 

This post was originally published on Michael West.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

High Court ruling

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

This post was originally published on Michael West.

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

US nuclear deterrent

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

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

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

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

24/7 Operation

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

North West Cape

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

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

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

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

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

A bedrock of certainty

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

But the US does want something.

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

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

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

Remove the transmitter keys

North West Cape forms part of that certainty. 

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

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

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

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

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

Trump cards

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

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

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

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

Things have changed

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

This post was originally published on Michael West.

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

US nuclear deterrent

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

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

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

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

24/7 Operation

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

North West Cape

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

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

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

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

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

A bedrock of certainty

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

But the US does want something.

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

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

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

Remove the transmitter keys

North West Cape forms part of that certainty. 

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

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

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

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

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

Trump cards

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

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

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

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

Things have changed

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

This post was originally published on Michael West.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A Cabinet document

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Document purpose

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Reckless conduct

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

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

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

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

Ignoring the rules for convenience

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Nuclear waste. AUKUS agency’s reckless indifference

Stop the secrecy!

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

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

Dutton obliged.

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

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

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

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

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

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

This post was originally published on Michael West.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Better Council – more Labor than grassroots

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

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

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

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

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

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

Advance trials election strategy in Queensland

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Mission accomplished Birenbaum also joins Labor

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

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

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

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

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

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

Undercover Birenbaum sets up Greens candidate

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

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

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

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

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

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

This post triggered many responses, including homophobic ones. 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What Labor did about it

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Watershed moment for Greens

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

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

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

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

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

Inside the ARC of Israel influence in the Queensland Election

This post was originally published on Michael West.

The Labor government has done what the Coalition didn’t, and the Aged Care Royal Commission warned against, privatising aged care assessment and awarded $1.5 billion worth of contracts to for-profit operators. Sarah Russell reports.

The Coalition government abandoned plans to privatise aged care assessments in 2021 following an outcry from key stakeholders amid warnings of risks to the health of older Australians and conflicts of interest.

Three years later, the Albanese Labor government has stealthily done what the Coalition government recognised as a step too far. Labor has largely privatised the aged care assessments under the guise of the ‘Single Assessment System‘.

What’s worse, aged care assessments are being conducted by organisations that also deliver aged care support, a clear conflict of interest. Catholic Healthcare, for example, operates 42 residential aged care homes and provides home care services to about 4,000 older Australians. It was awarded nearly $136 million to undertake aged care assessments until 2029.

The Aged Care Royal Commission expressly warned against this, recommending that all assessments be undertaken by an assessor who was not involved in providing aged care so that a person’s level of funding would be determined independently.

Nearly $1.5 billion has been handed out to private operators under the Single Assessment System to conduct aged care assessments, according to contract details released last December by the Department of Health and Aged Care.

Aged Care Royal Commission

A Single Assessment System was a recommendation of the Royal Commission into Aged Care Quality and Safety, which the Coalition accepted.

However, its plans to privatise aged care assessments were met with fierce resistance, including from state and territory health ministers, the Australian Medical Association (AMA) and the Australian and New Zealand Society for Geriatric Medicine.

The AMA, for example, warned that privatisation

would risk the health of older Australians and open the system up to conflicts of interest.

Despite these warnings, the federal Labor government has now proceeded down the privatisation path. In early 2024, there was an open tender process for organisations with the capacity and capability to deliver aged care assessments for the Single Assessment System. Since December 2024, the private sector (both for-profit and not-for-profit) has been undertaking aged care assessments. State and territory governments continue to deliver hospital-based assessments.

Since December, concerns have been growing about the quality of assessments under this privatised system.

Assessment system failure

I was recently asked to advocate for Susan (not her real name) following an aged care assessment undertaken by APM – a private company that was awarded $226 million to undertake assessments. Susan lives alone on the Mornington Peninsula with no family on hand to offer support.

In July 2024, Susan’s GP requested a comprehensive assessment via My Aged Care. In December 2024, Susan mistakenly received a regional assessment. According to those working in the sector, this is a common mistake.

Comprehensive assessments need to be undertaken by staff who are clinically qualified. These assessors not only ask questions but also probe the answers. They know that older people with cognitive failure can present very well, so it is critical to dig deeper.

Regional assessments, on the other hand, do not require staff with a tertiary degree. According to a number of senior staff in aged care, new assessors working for some private companies may only receive eight hours of online training to conduct regional assessments. These aged care staff are also concerned that some assessments are conducted over the phone if the assessor does not have time to do a face-to-face interview.

Susan’s regional assessment was riddled with errors, some quite serious. These errors have been highlighted in pink.

When I raised concerns about the inaccuracies in Susan’s assessment with the Minister for Aged Care, I received the following response from the Department of Health and Ageing:

“I would like to assure you that the Australian Government is committed to creating a better experience for older people in Australia seeking aged care services.

“The department has developed a new Single Assessment System, to simplify and improve the experience of older individuals undergoing aged care assessments. As part of this system, one workforce will be empowered and trained to conduct the necessary assessments across both home and residential care. This important reform is an opportunity to improve the delivery of aged care assessments, including assessment wait times.”

Fixing a system that wasn’t broken

In the past, our taxes funded councils to undertake regional assessments and provide aged care services under the Commonwealth Home Support Program. Council services were in the main excellent and much appreciated by recipients. Older residents and their families appreciated having a highly trained and fairly remunerated Council employee provide aged care services.

They also knew they were not being ripped off by a private provider that prioritised profits over care.

However, councils have exited aged care in droves because of changes in the way the Federal Government funds aged care. According to the Australian Services Union, just 26 of Victoria’s 79 councils currently provide aged care home services.

So now our taxes are given to large private companies to undertake the private assessments and then private companies to deliver the services.

In some cases, the company that undertakes the assessment is the same company that delivers the home care. What could possibly go wrong?

Written in collaboration with Elizabeth Minter.

This post was originally published on Michael West.

China exposes a fundamental flaw in Australia’s nuclear submarine project. While their navy operates off our coast, AUKUS is sapping funds from capabilities needed today. Former submariner Rex Patrick reports. 

Many Australians have been disturbed, indeed angered, by Chinese warships operating in our exclusive economic zone over the past weeks. How dare they! But the fact is that the Chinese vessels – a destroyer, a frigate and a replenishment ship – are operating in accordance with international law and simply doing to us what we’ve done to them for decades.

Readers will remember a number of recent incidents in which the Chinese military confronted Australian military assets conducting maritime operations in areas of interest to China.

In April 2018, three Australian Naval vessels operating in international waters off Vietnam were challenged by People’s Liberation Army Navy (PLAN) warships.

In November 2023, a PLAN warship closed and transmitted sonar pulses at a disabled RAN ANZAC class warship, HMAS Toowoomba, in international waters off Japan. In February this year, a Chinese Air Force J-16 fighter released flares just 30 metres in front of a Royal Australian Air Force P-8A Poseidon surveillance aircraft.

On all of these occasions, Australia asserted the right of our navy and air force to operate freely in international waters and air space.

Maybe we need to contain our anger!

Strategic takeaways

There are a couple of significant takeaways from the Chinese task group deployment.

The first is that PLAN is no longer a ‘brown-water navy‘. It’s a blue-water navy that can project itself at significant range. In months and years to come, we can expect to see more PLAN warships in Australia’s immediate region and, indeed, in our Exclusive Economic Zone. That’s inevitable.

The second thing to recognise is the fact that our AUKUS submarine strategy is fundamentally flawed.

AUKUS flaw

As the Chinese are operating off the coast of Australia now, we might, and it’s a big might, get our first Virginia Class nuclear-powered submarine in a decade, around 2035.

Whilst Australia embarks on a $368B submarine procurement program, money is being sapped from current programs that would deliver relevant capability now. There is also a huge opportunity cost for procuring other relevant capabilities that could be purchased for near-term delivery.

As PLAN warships were conducting live-fire exercises off the coast of Australia, the only possible contribution that the AUKUS project team could have made in response to it would have been to visually identify those ships by one of its team members flying in a commercial jet over the Tasman Sea en route to another taxpayer-funded junket in Washington.

AUKUS Gravy Plane: $633K a month in flights with the taxpayer picking up the tab

Furthermore, the nuclear submarines we are currently trying to acquire have the capability to operate for extended periods off the coast of China, but that’s simply unnecessary – the PLAN has well and truly arrived off our coast.  They’re bringing the party to us. Even a relatively modest PLAN deployment across our sea lanes would keep our modestly sized navy well and truly tied up.

Sure, we might decide to support the defence of Taiwan, a fellow democracy, but having a new submarine turn up in 2035 doesn’t help with a 2027 biffo.  And even if we did have a submarine, no one can be sure that the United States would turn up for the fight.

President Trump may well just see the fate of Taiwan as another real estate deal, something to be traded away for the right price.

State of readiness

This PLAN ‘visit’ to Australian waters highlights our current force weakness. Whilst we have been cooperating with New Zealand in shadowing the three-ship task group, we really don’t have much in the way of assets to deal with the PLAN’s enhanced capabilities.

Indeed, the Chief of Defence Force has advised the Senate that, despite having a budget this financial year of $58B, it was a Virgin Australian pilot that first advised the Australian Government that the PLAN was conducting live-fire exercises off the east coast.

Our current order of battle is of great concern, noting the growing geopolitical tension in our regions.

We have a couple of relatively modern Air Warfare Destroyers available to the Australian Fleet Commander. But that’s where the good news ends. Only six of our seven 20 to 30-year-old ANZAC frigates are in the water, and it is not known how many of them are operationally worked up to respond to the PLAN.

The Chief of Defence Force, Admiral Johnston, advised the Senate that two ANZAC frigates have been involved in shadowing the task group.

In terms of our six aging Collins class submarines, only three are in the “custody” of the Navy, as described by the Chief of Navy, Vice Admiral Hammond, to the Senate. It’s not clear how many are worked up for tasking. The Navy won’t say.

Indeed, it might just be best for the Navy to keep that number under wraps because the number might be just too embarrassing and a positive invitation to the PLAN to come down under more often.

The Department of Defence has proved incompetent in procuring ships. The future frigate program is an exemplar of that procurement failure.  First, it was $30B for 9 ships, then $45B for 9 ships, then $45B for just 6 ships, and there’ll be no new ships delivered to the Navy until 2032.

There is a tender underway for a new off-the-shelf general-purpose frigate, which has a target date for the first delivery of 2029. On-time delivery is not common for Defence projects.

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

Alliance fracture

As the PLAN sail west through the Great Australia Bight and off into the distance, some Australians might breathe out and slump back into the traditional ‘she’ll be right’ attitude.

However, with Donald Trump’s re-accession to the US throne, there have been significant changes that one might hope Government and Defence would be paying attention to.

The world is changing rapidly. In just the past few weeks, we’ve seen President Trump floating the idea of a forced taking of the Panama Canal and Greenland in an assault on the norms of rules-based international order.

We’ve also seen the United States Administration cuddling up to Russia in relation to the invasion of Ukraine. There is talk in Europe of the United States walking away from the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation.

There are openly expressed concerns about the reliability of the United States as an ally.

As President Trump shifts his focus to the North American continent in a radical reorientation of US defence policy, Fortress America, it seems Australia needs to be asking the same questions as the Europeans.

Stand on our own

Two decades ago, Australia had a capable, flexible defence force configured for the defence of Australia with the option of expeditionary deployments where our capabilities complemented a multinational operation. 

The current plan on record has abandoned that sovereign goal and focussed on total integration with the US armed forces.

Our forces are now so integrated with and reliant upon the US military that not only is our capability to defend Australia gravely weakened but our own sovereign decision-making is compromised.  

Maybe it’s not just the Chinese that have done us a favour with their task group deployment. President Trump is helping out too.

Australia needs to abandon its bankrupting $368B all-eggs-in-one-basket monolithic AUKUS nuclear submarine program and get back to Defence basics.  We need a modern, capable, flexible and self-reliant Defence force that can meet our own sovereign needs. That is entirely achievable and affordable, provided we make the right decisions now. 

 

This post was originally published on Michael West.

On November 13, a researcher in the Parliamentary Library, Geoff Wade, lodged defamation proceedings against MWM and the author of this story.

On January 30, we attended a case management hearing before Justice Nicholas Owens of the Federal Court of Australia.

We had already made a number of efforts to address Geoff Wade’s concerns with his lawyers Alisa Taylor and Courtney Noble of Canberra law firm MV Law. These were ignored. We were instructed by Justice Owens to prepare a defence.

It was filed yesterday evening (and published below).

We believe the action is vexatious and without merit. Whether the Applicant has been defamed or not is for the Court to decide.

In order to fund the case, we undertook a crowdfunding campaign and surpassed the target of $40k in 24 hours then closed the offer at $48,666. We are deeply appreciative of the community support!

It is important that we are transparent. We pledged to make public the Wade claim (it is published here) and legal correspondence in the matter, including our Defence.

The Defence has just been filed by Sharangan Maheswaran, Mark Davis and Jack Vaughan of XD Law and Advocacy. We publish it below so that supporters and the public can judge for themselves as to the merits of the claim and the defence.

Our legal defences are Contextual Truth, Truth, Public Interest and Qualified Privilege. Wade has been a prolific social media poster mostly interested in Chinese spying in Australia.

His political campaigning included doxing people on Twitter who he believed were connected with the Chinese Communist Party.

In preparation for the story, The Manchurian Candidate, we examined many of Wade’s 60,000 or so tweets, put questions to his lawyers from MV Law, spoke at length with a number of sources who had been distressed by the legal threats from MV Law and put questions to then DPS secretary Rob Stefanic. He responded for the story.

Along with four other publishers – Marcus Reubenstein, Suzy Cong, James Laurenceson and John Menadue – we had previously been threatened with defamation by Mr Wade. Details are here.

Shoebridge takes DPS to task

On Monday morning, DPS was before Senate Estimates. Senator David Shoebridge questioned Deputy Secretary of the Department, Jaala Hinchcliffe, and other department bosses Nicola Hinder and Stephen Fox, as well as Senate President Sue Lines about their knowledge of the Wade activities.

DPS was questioned over a lawsuit – a counter defamation claim against Wade and the Department – from journalist Marcus Reubenstein which was settled in 2021 at a substantial cost to the Commonwealth.

The exchange between Shoebridge and Lines became heated. The DPS responses, though, were mostly to say they would take “questions on notice”, which means they did not know the answers at that time and would respond to the Senate later.

David Shoebridge grills Parliament Services on China tweeter

This post was originally published on Michael West.

Last week’s rate cut and the argy-bargy over how hawkish or indecisive the RBA remains overshadowed important details in our central bank’s statement on monetary policy, Michael Pascoe reveals.

With the Coalition matching Labor’s bulk-billing announcement, blunting a Mediscare campaign, the Albanese Government needs a major differentiator to halt its slide in the polls. The Reserve Bank pointed to one last week: housing.

Not only is the housing crisis not going away, it’s set to worsen according to the RBA’s figures. New dwelling investment is expected to grow by only 0.9% this financial year and just 0.3% in the next. That 2025-26 forecast is a downgrade from 1.3% growth the RBA forecast in November to bugger-all now, to use a technical term.

Jim Chalmers’ May budget was based on a fantasy forecast of 6.25% new dwelling investment growth next year, revised to a still fantastical 5% in December’s mid-year economic forecast.

The RBA has effectively told Jim he’s dreamin’.

Even out in 2026-27 the bank only sees 2.5% growth.

That is nowhere near enough to make a dint in our housing shortage to absorb our population growth. It again labels the “1.2 million new dwellings in five years” target as nonsense. But at the same time, the bank reports there are signs of improved capacity to build shelter.

Capacity growth

The RBA states there are still capacity constraints “for tradespeople employed towards the end of the construction process e.g. plasterers and tilers,” but the RBA’s business liaison contacts “report that builders are offering discounts in some cities in response to weak demand, which has contributed to an unexpected easing in new dwelling inflation.”

“New demand remains weakest in the higher density sector, with liaison contacts continuing to note that construction costs remain too high relative to selling prices, while detached commencements picked up over 2024.”

That cuts to the core of insufficient housing starts. Regardless of a little interest rate cut and some prices falling, prices ran so high as to finally meet buyer resistance on one hand while the cost of building new supply on over-priced land is unprofitable for private developers.

Prices need to fall further to encourage buyers, but lower prices make it harder for developers to take up the various state government offers of higher-density permissions. Leaving housing to “the market” means supply will continue to be inadequate until prices are again on the upward march, maintaining the crisis.

As economist Cameron Murray, one of the very few to see past the developers’ lobby bulldust, sarcastically tweeted: “I thought regulations were the constraint on new homes, but it turns out the market always limits the rate of new housing development.”

Which is where opportunity is knocking for Labor. If “the market” won’t build enough housing as capacity constraints ease, the chance is there for the government to step in to fill the gap.

Government’s responsibility to act

It’s more than the chance; it is the responsibility of the government to do so, as it should in the provision of any essential service where the private sector fails.

The danger for Labor is the knowledge that it already is taking clearly superior housing policy to the election. Dutton’s promise to scrap the Housing Australia Future Fund would end a solid attempt to at least maintain the existing (though inadequate) level of social and affordable housing.

The LNP’s housing policies are all about increasing demand, not filling the gap in supply, listening only to the developers’ lobby, to “the market” that has steadily built this crisis over the past three decades.

Every poll pings housing as one of the electorate’s biggest concerns. If it comes down to deciding which way independent MPs jump with minority government, a clearly positive housing policy versus a clearly negative one should be right up there with the two parties’ climate credibility.

This is the chance for Labor to claim the spirit of Robert Menzies, the founder of the Liberal Party,

in direct government action to support the Great Australian Dream.

It was Menzies who knew housing could not be left to “the market” and poured Federal funding into building both to buy and to rent.

More recently, there was the Social Housing Initiative, an overshadowed but very successful part of the Rudd/Gillard government’s GFC stimulus.

The $5.6B delivered 19,700 new social housing homes plus repairs to 80,000 existing dwellings, including 12,000 major upgrades to housing that was vacant and in danger of becoming uninhabitable.

Without a bigger, bolder initiative, housing supply is set to plod along, maintaining the status quo. The industry reports improving demand for detached houses while the high-rise apartments being promoted by state governments are going nowhere.

The SMH ($) quotes Housing Industry Association economist Tom Devitt: “Land and construction costs are too high both for people to afford those kinds of housing volumes and for it to be viable for the industry to build.”

That looks like tautology to me.

Where governments already own the land, there is the opportunity to do what the private sector cannot and actually get serious about the crisis instead of only trying to be better than the LNP’s drive to push up demand and, therefore, prices.

But it would take strong leadership, bold leadership prepared to have a crack and ignore developers’ lobbying and the doctrinaire rantings of the national dailies.

Three decades of policy failure. Productivity Commission’s housing shame file

 

This post was originally published on Michael West.

Greens senator David Shoebridge grilled the Department of Parliamentary Services in Senate Estimates today over the prolific social media poster in the Library who is suing Michael West Media.

This is “Rough Hansard” (pre transcription) so any changes will be updated.

David Shoebridge (DS) – Thank you for your attendance. Mr [Stephen] Fox (DPS) might be best placed to answer. In 2021, DPS was sued by journalist Marcus Reubenstein in relation to a series of publications that were made by Dr Geoffrey Wade while he was working, and on the company dime. 

Do you remember that legal action against DPS Steven Fox? 

Fox – Thank you. Good morning. I was not in the role in that period. I have been in that role for about 18 months. It precedes my time. 

DS – Do you remember the litigation against DPS? 

Fox – No. I do not. 

DS – Alright. Does anyone have institutional memory of the proceedings? 

Fox – There’s no-one here that was here at the time but we can answer your questions and take them on notice. 

DS – In answers to an earlier round of estimates, it was clear the then Departmental Secretary attended the mediation for those proceedings, Mr Stefanic. And either he or another senior officer was a signatory to a final deed of settlement which saw the Commonwealth make a significant payment. As a result of the actions of Dr Wade. 

Would you produce to this Committee the deed of settlement that was entered into? And whether we are able to in terms of the deed. I’m not asking about the terms of the deed. 

Fox – I’ll take the matter on notice.

DS – You would know the terms of the deed could not override parliamentary privilege? You would know that wouldn’t you?

Fox – I appreciate that and you wouldn’t want me to do something that wasn’t legally possible for me to do and we’ll see what the terms are and come back to you. I’m pushing back on your suggestion if there’s something in the deed that says confidentiality that wouldn’t answer the inquiry to be clear. Ms Hinchcliffe understands the powers of this Committee but also that she has the ability to make a public interest immunity claim, should it be in the public interest.

Senator Shoebridge, please continue. 

DS – Thank you. Was the amount paid in settlement by the Commonwealth to Mr Reubenstein, was it $110,000 or some other amount? If it’s another amount, can you identify it?

Fox – I’ll take it on notice. 

DS – Thank you. Did that include, and if the amount paid under the deed was a set figure – and if you could provide us with that – were there other payments made by the Commonwealth including to their legal costs and what if any legal costs were incurred?

Fox – I’ll take it on notice for you. 

DS – Were there any restrictions or was there any action taken against Dr Wade for costing the Commonwealth more than $100,000 because of the actions he undertook while he was working for the Commonwealth? 

Fox – Any action taken against Dr Wade? I’ll have to take it on notice. 

DS – Alright. When did you say you commenced, Mr Fox? 

Fox – 18 September, 2023. 

DS – In November 2023, I understand a series of questions were put to DPS by an independent media outlet asking if they’re aware that Dr Wade was engaging in further social media commentary during work hours on X under a pseudonym? 

You were the parliamentary librarian at the time. Do you recall that? They were made to the secretary at the time. Was any investigation done as to whether or not Dr Wade was during work hours using that X account?

Fox – I’ll need to take it on notice. That was handled by the office of the secretary at the time. Mr Stefanic was the officer who had the questions directed at him. 

DS – Between Mr Stefanic and Dr Wade, are you in the intermediate management chain?

Fox – Yes. 

DS – Are you saying you weren’t in any way involved in that? 

Fox – I was not. 

DS – That would seem peculiar, the Secretary engages directly with someone — somebody in your employ and you’re totally unaware of it? 

Fox – That was the arrangement that was possibly, and possibly because of the previous issues that were around that you’ve been asking questions about. 

DS – Why are you speculating its relation to previous issues? Did you have some knowledge? 

Fox – I can’t speak for Mr Stefanic’s reason for handling the matter. 

DS – That X account … did engage in quite aggressive political commentary, aggressive political attacks. And was happening during work hours. Was any action taken against Dr Wade in relation to again doing that? 

DPS – Good morning. I’m the Acting Deputy Secretary and the Chief Operating Officer. I have the HR portfolio within my remit. I’m very happy to take that question on notice. I understand that there was some consideration but as to what that consideration was, what that actually found, I’m not aware but I’m very willing to take it back on notice and come back to you. 

DS – Was HR involved in the, was there an investigation following that question in November of 2023? 

DPS – Senator, I would be confident about my myself, but I’d have to take it on notice. R has had some involvement and what that involvement was and what it constituted, I’d like to be able to confirm. 

DS – Okay. We’re left in an uncomfortable situation where we have the whole of the senior management team of the Department here. And nobody can answer whether or not even whether or not an HR investigation was undertaken in relation to a senior researcher for questions that were asked in November of 2023. 

It does seem, given the number of people we have here, and I can name them all, no-one can shed any light on this? 

DPS – That’s a little unfair because the officers have indicated to you they were not the officers at the time. They are doing their best to assist and they have taken it on notice.

DS – That’s not true. Mr Fox was the Parliamentary Librarian at the time. 

DPS – Ms Hinchcliffe has taken the matter on notice. It’s unfair to make that accusation that somehow they have knowledge of this event. 

DS – I didn’t make that accusation. 

DPS – If you wish to make that accusation. They were not the officers. You mischaracterised their evidence. You mischaracterised it. You put words in my mouth. You did. It’s unhelpful when you do that. You’re being unhelpful by making that sweeping generalisation that somehow these officers should know something that happened before they were there. 

DS – To be clear, I don’t know if you heard Mr Fox’s evidence? Did you hear it? Let me finish my question. Would you please let me finish my question? Did you hear Mr Fox’s evidence that he was the parliamentary librarian and had managerial oversight of Dr Wade at the time the questions were directed?

I heard the whole of his evidence which was the former secretary dealt with this matter. Was any disciplinary action taken against Dr Wade as a result of again his inappropriate use of X? 

DPS – Senator, I’m very happy to include that as part of my response when I come back to you. 

DS – Has Dr Wade informed the department that he’s now commenced his own litigation against a series of media outlets? Senator, we are aware that there have been private proceedings that have been launched. Has Dr Wade informed you it’s likely to involve significant engagement about his work and his activities at work which may involve yet more Commonwealth resources? Has he informed you of that? 

DPS – At the moment, my understanding of that is the private legal matter has just commenced. We have not yet had an understanding as to what if any departmental involvement or information might be required. But we are very aware there’s a private matter that’s been launched. 

DS – There’s an obligation if people are working for DPS to be mindful of potential conflicts of interest. Has Dr Wade advised the DPS these proceedings may amount to a conflict of interest as they will inevitably traverse his work as a parliamentary librarian? 

DPS – We are paying close attention to conflicts of interest across the Department. I personally have not sighted Mr Wade’s conflict. I will do so and come back to the Committee.

DS – You say his conflict. If there is a potential conflict that’s been identified. By Mr Wade. So you’re not aware if he has just to be clear? Is that true? 

DPS – I have not sighted his conflict. I’m not saying whether or not he has or not yet declared one. There’s an obligation to as soon as you’re aware of a potential conflict to notify your employer of it? There’s an obligation to be mindful of their personal and work interactions and to declare possible or potential conflicts as they arise. 

So if you would on notice provide any such conflict, notice of conflict to the Committee, indicate, if one has been made, indicate on what date any such conflict was made? 

DPS – Happy to take it on notice, Senator. 

DS – And just so there’s absolutely unambiguous, can whoever is in a position in DPS to answer this, advise if there was an investigation of the X account, whether or not Dr Wade confirmed he was the author of or the owner of such an account? 

DPS – Happy to take it on notice. 

DS – If there was an investigation of the Twitter account, what if any conclusions were made in relation to that investigation? 

DPS – Happy to take that on notice, Senator. I understand it was deleted a few days after the queries were made to DPS. 

DS – Again, if the investigation hit a blank wall because it was deleted, whether or not any actions were taken for deleting a necessary source of investigation.

DPS – I’ll take it on notice. 

—- The author discloses a potential conflict of interest. Geoff Wade has launched defamation proceedings against MWM and the author of this story. We are defending the claim. Details here.

 

This post was originally published on Michael West.

A senior army officer who dismissed sex abuse complaints as alcohol-related was appointed to lead SAS “reforms” ahead of the Brereton war crimes report. Stuart McCarthy reports.

The Albanese government’s appointment of recently retired Defence Chief General Angus Campbell as Ambassador to Belgium, NATO and the European Union has reignited a long-running sex abuse scandal in the infantry battalion, which was commanded by Campbell in East Timor at the turn of the century.

The controversy highlights deep-rooted cultural and institutional problems among the defence force’s most senior generals, their failures to deal with sexual and other serious abuse, and what former soldiers call “gross hypocrisy at the highest command levels” throughout the Afghanistan war crimes saga.

Adding fuel to the controversy is how a decorated senior army officer who dismissed complaints about sex abuse by a Sergeant – the Sergeant was later convicted of multiple rapes and sexual assaults – was appointed to lead in-house Defence “reforms” of the SAS ahead of Major General Paul Brereton’s landmark 2020 report on alleged war crimes in Afghanistan.

The officer now acknowledges his initial conclusions that the complaints were alcohol-related rather than sexual in nature proved to be incorrect once the facts became known.

Three decades after the abuse occurred in the Townsville-based 2nd Battalion, the Royal Australian Regiment (2 RAR), a group of survivors and family members profoundly affected by ongoing trauma are now calling for Prime Minister Anthony Albanese to launch an independent investigation into more evidence of sexual abuse involving the same former Sergeant.

They also want the probe to examine “potential cover-ups” by officers up the chain of command. The group has given MWM credible accounts of an additional alleged rape and at least two additional alleged sexual assaults that occurred in the battalion during the mid-1990s and says there are “likely” to have been more.

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

Apologise, Review, Rinse, Repeat

In 2012, then Defence Minister Stephen Smith apologised in Parliament to the victims of sexual abuse in the defence force after a 1500-page review by law firm DLA Piper uncovered several hundred credible allegations of abuse, including rape and sexual assault. He told Parliament the government’s “actions and commitment into the future” would ensure such an apology “will never have to be repeated.”

The government responded to the DLA Piper report by establishing the Defence Abuse Response Taskforce (DART), initially led by Major-General Len Roberts-Smith, which eventually found 1,723 “plausible” complaints of sexual abuse at the Australian Defence Force Academy (ADFA), resulting in more than $60 million in “reparation” payments at a maximum of $50,000 per individual complainants. The final DART report in 2016 says a total of 133 complaints comprising 191 separate abuse allegations “that could constitute a criminal offence” were referred to state and territory police forces.

Defence abuse expert Professor Ben Wadham told MWM he doesn’t know if any of those referrals have resulted in actual prosecutions, “Through my research, there have been numerous cases of individuals who experienced institutional abuse and sexual assault where the perpetrators have been identified but have not come before the criminal justice system for resolution.

The principal barrier is jurisdictional authority between the military justice system and civilian police.

Wadham is the director of the ‘Open Door: Improving the Wellbeing of Veterans, Public Safety Personnel and their Families’ research initiative at Flinders University and provided key testimony on institutional abuse to the Royal Commission into Defence and Veteran Suicide (DVSRC).

The cycle sadly continues. As recently as 2021, Campbell reportedly warned a class of ADFA officer cadets not to go out late at night and consume alcohol while presenting themselves as “attractive” to avoid falling “prey” to sexual abuse. Critics suggested Campbell’s comments were “dangerous” and “outdated,” leading to “victim blaming” and “barriers to the victims of sexual assault being able to talk.” Campbell responded, saying his speech was “misinterpreted by some.”

Bystander behaviour

The 2 RAR survivor group also accuses the senior Defence hierarchy of the same “bystander behaviour” that top generals blamed for enabling Australian special forces war crimes in Afghanistan.

MWM can also reveal military police involved in an investigation into the conduct of the former Sergeant at 2 RAR raised concerns about the possibility of similar misconduct in the 1st Recruit Training Battalion (1 RTB) at Wagga Wagga, where he previously served as a recruit instructor.

These concerns are shared by other sources who have recently spoken to MWM.

The Courier Mail reported in 2012 that a 1994 complaint of two sexual assaults committed by the Sergeant was made to then Major Shane Caughey, a company commander in 2 RAR.

Defence documents, including a sworn statement from the complainant, show Caughey dismissed the complaint on the grounds that there was “never a hint” of the Sergeant’s homosexuality.

One year later the Queensland Police charged the Sergeant with raping a soldier at a civilian residence, then another soldier came forward with rape and assault allegations. The Sergeant was eventually convicted of assaulting four soldiers and raping two, sentenced to imprisonment by civilian and military authorities, and discharged from the defence force.

Defence documents also show that in 2001 Caughey – by then a Lieutenant Colonel – was issued a “show cause” notice after an investigation found the rape at the civilian residence “arguably” could have been prevented if the earlier sexual assault complaint had been handled “more rigorously.”

Not so secret military justice review at odds with suicide royal commission

Incomplete information

MWM does not allege any wrongdoing by Caughey. However, his documented handling of the complaint does illustrate cultural and institutional barriers to sex abuse reporting at the defence force leadership level. To Caughey’s credit, he responded to MWM’s query in his private capacity, not representing Defence or any other organisation.

He says he is not aware of any other reported or alleged offences or suspicions held by the military police in relation to the former Sergeant’s service at 1 RTB prior to his 2 RAR posting. On his handling of the initial complaint, Caughey acknowledges that based on “incomplete information” initially provided to him, “My initial conclusion that these incidents were not sexual in nature, but were actions consistent with disorientation based on excessive alcohol consumption … proved to be incorrect once all facts became known.”

For legal reasons and to protect the identities of survivors and their families, MWM will not name the former Sergeant or the complainants. The abuse survivors who spoke to MWM are fearful of the repercussions if their identities are exposed by Defence officials motivated by containing reputation damage to themselves or 2 RAR.

Culture of impunity

The abuse survivors say this is why they need Albanese’s direct intervention with an investigation “completely independent” of Defence and the military justice system. They cite a “culture of impunity, gross hypocrisy and arse-covering” in the defence force senior leadership – laid bare throughout the Brereton inquiry and the DVSRC – as justification for appealing to Albanese.

During the DVSRC’s proceedings the Commission’s chair Nick Kaldas – a former Deputy NSW Police Commissioner – publicly flayed Defence’s top brass for “catastrophic leadership failures.”

A key finding in the DVSRC final report last year was that the “military justice system” – including the Inspector-General of the Australian Defence Force (IGADF) – had been “weaponised” against complainants and other Defence personnel affected by their inquiries, often through the abuse of administrative law as a proxy for criminal proceedings.

The Brereton inquiry was held under the auspices of the IGADF and has been heavily criticised for its failure to find command culpability on the part of senior defence force officers. Brereton was appointed by the Albanese Government as the inaugural head of the National Anti-Corruption Commission in July 2023.

Caughey told MWM he categorically denies there were cover-ups through the chain of command. He says new allegations or evidence of abuse should be “referred to the civilian police.” Regarding the survivors, he says:

It is my strong desire and hope that any person impacted directly or indirectly by the actions of [the former Sergeant] be afforded all available support for their ongoing trauma.

Despite his 2001 “show cause” notice, Caughey rose through the ranks to Major General and retired from the defence force in 2018. Until recently, he performed the honorary role of Colonel Commandant of the Royal Australian Regiment, the parent organisation of the Army’s regular infantry battalions.

Royal Commission into Veteran Suicide confronts lawfare, cronyism and a bureaucratic nightmare

Brereton Inquiry

Amid growing war crimes speculation and media leaks around the Brereton inquiry’s proceedings in 2019, Caughey was appointed to the role of independent “special forces advisor,” answerable to then Chief of Army Lieutenant General Rick Burr.

Burr told The Australian in 2020 ($) that Caughey’s mandate was to “support and monitor the implementation of reforms” to the SAS recommended in a 2018 review of the Army’s special operations command by former spy chief David Irvine.

Caughey’s appointment coincided with Burr’s vocal, public attacks on junior and middle-ranking special forces troops in Afghanistan for “bystander behaviour” enabling war crimes. Burr said to The Australian at the time:

It’s critical to our profession that people call out bad behaviour when they see it … we want our people to call it out so it can be acted on quickly.

The current Defence staff directory indicates Caughey remains in his special forces reform role to this day, presumably as a contractor or consultant. (MWM asked Defence to confirm Caughey’s current employment status, but they did not respond.)

Survivor group call for investigation

The 2 RAR survivor group’s calls for an independent investigation are backed by experts in military law and Defence abuse, one of whom says the investigation should have the powers of a royal commission.

Professor Wadham told MWM the defence force remains “manifestly incapable” of holding itself to account for institutional failures in responding to abuse cases such as this one. He says that when survivors and families meet institutional barriers to reporting abuse, they “find  another way.”

In Wadham’s view, appealing to executive government via the media is a “perfectly legitimate” approach to seeking recourse, citing the 2011 ADFA Skype sex scandal that triggered the DLA Piper review and DART, among other more recent examples.

The former 2 RAR soldiers who spoke to MWM on condition of confidentiality were in their late teens to early twenties at the time of the abuse. At least one has chronic, “treatment resistant” post-traumatic stress disorder so severe he has undergone the controversial electro-convulsive treatment. One of their spouses told MWM:

“I believe the proven and alleged abuse, cover-up, and then promotion of those responsible for the cover-up have eroded the trust of the entire battalion and significantly contributed to the distortion of culture that has played out in these men’s lives. A culture of silence was not only encouraged but reinforced by the 2 RAR hierarchy, then backed up through the highest ranks when Caughey was promoted. 2 RAR is a battalion sworn to secrecy, and its darkness stemmed from the top down.”

Military lawyer and Defence analyst Dr Glenn Kolomeitz says the defence force’s mishandling of the abuse in 2 RAR thus far “is classic Defence incompetence stuff.” He told MWM:

“Not only is an independent inquiry warranted, it should have the powers of a royal commission to seize departmental documents, protect the witnesses and tackle the jurisdictional issues arising from sex offences in a military setting. Hand-passing this to IGADF or the civilian police would be a blunder.”

Command responsibility

Dr Kolomeitz drafted Senator Jacqui Lambie’s 2023 referral of senior defence force officers to the Prosecutor of the International Criminal Court for an investigation into the war crime of command responsibility.

The referral was triggered by the Albanese Government’s failure to initiate criminal proceedings against senior officers who knew or should have known war crimes were being committed by troops under their command in Afghanistan but failed to take action.

An independent oversight report discrediting Brereton’s exoneration of the Defence leadership was suppressed for months last year by Defence Minister Richard Marles, until the day military whistleblower David McBride was sentenced to more than five years in jail, for disclosing classified documents implicating senior officers in command culpability for crimes identified in the Brereton report.

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

Angus Campbell’s role

The sex abuse survivors and family members who spoke to MWM are scathing in their criticisms of “gross hypocrisy” among 2 RAR officers and their peers who rose through the ranks to senior command and leadership appointments in the years leading up to the Brereton inquiry and DVSRC. One former soldier said to MWM:

How on earth did [Campbell] become chief of the defence force after the [sex abuse] shit-fight in 2 RAR? He and his mates were the worst bystanders.

Although the sexual abuse occurred years before Campbell took command of 2 RAR in 2001, the survivors accuse Campbell and his peers of “turning a blind eye” not only to the initial abuse complaints, but the ongoing health and welfare needs of affected soldiers and families who were – and remain – badly traumatised.

Campbell was later the national commander of Australian troops in the Middle East and Afghanistan in 2011, then promoted to Chief of Army in 2015. His referral of so-called “rumours” of war crimes to the IGADF in 2016 triggered the Brereton inquiry.

Campbell and Burr were leading proponents of the now-debunked “we didn’t know” narrative in efforts to circumvent criminal liability for command responsibility under Australian and international law.

One of the more notorious war crimes identified in the Brereton report was, in fact, publicly reported to Prime Minister Julia Gillard, Defence Minister Stephen Smith and Defence Force Chief General David Hurley by the President of Afghanistan in 2012, four years before Campbell’s IGADF referral.

MWM has approached Albanese, Marles and Defence Personnel Minister Matt Keogh for comment, asking if they support the 2 RAR survivors’ calls for an independent inquiry into the abuse and potential command cover-ups.

Our media query to Albanese was flicked to Defence, but after agreeing to an extended deadline, we have received no response from either Defence or the Prime Minister’s office.

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

This post was originally published on Michael West.

While much of the ire over Whyalla’s struggling steel plant has centred on the billionaire formerly at its helm, how was the situation allowed to fester for so long? Where was ASIC? Andrew Gardiner reports.

The turmoil surrounding Whyalla’s steelworks – now in administration amid a promised Federal-State bailout – took a new turn on Thursday, with attacks on the Australian Securities and Investments Commission (ASIC). The regulator was accused of being “asleep at the wheel” at the plant’s peril, while billionaire owner Sanjeev Gupta “worked on renovation approvals for his $34m Sydney mansion”. 

In a letter to ASIC chairman Joseph Longo, Senator Jacqui Lambie called on the regulator to belatedly investigate the plant’s former owners, the Gupta Family Group (GFG), for reportedly trading while insolvent. With 1,100 jobs on the line and hundreds of others relying on the steelworks, Senator Lambie said the signs were there for months that something was seriously wrong.

“ASIC is still oblivious to what’s going on? So I’ve got a message for Mr Longo – I’ve got a Christmas card list and a bullseye list, and you’re about to be shifted from one to the other,” she told MWM. 

“GFG has been operating in circumstances of grave financial difficulties and an apparent inability to pay its debts, large and small when they were due,” Lambie wrote in her letter to ASIC. “For months on end, the people and businesses of Whyalla have been suffering (and it) can’t be that GFG directors can just walk away from this scot-free,” she added later. 

“In November, Rex Patrick and I publicly called for (GFG subsidiary One Steel Manufacturing) to be put into administration.

Mr Longo is getting paid $858k per annum and appears to be doing nothing for those paying his way.

Senator Jacqui Lambie

In extraordinary scenes on Wednesday, the SA Government moved to place One Steel into administration, appointing KordaMentha as administrator, and ramming changes to the Whyalla Steel Works Act through state parliament with haste some say should have been seen months ago.

From Whyalla to Williamtown, for KordaMentha, where there’s a bill there’s a way

The move came after alarm bells were raised over the failure by GFG – a group with annual worldwide revenue of around $20B – to restore its crippled blast furnace to full capacity, and January’s announcement by the company of 350 contractor job cuts, a move which blindsided workers.

Rescue package in place

On Thursday, the state and federal governments announced details of a $2.4B plan to rescue the steelworks, including plant upgrades and close to $2B in subsidies for a new private owner.

The three-part plan includes $32.6m for infrastructure improvement, $50m for creditors, and $6m for a jobs and skills hub, Prime Minister Anthony Albanese said. 

Another $384m of state and federal funds was expected to ensure workers and contractors at Whyalla Steelworks get paid while the plant is in a state of flux. 

Albanese said a further $1.9B would be used to “work with a new owner to invest in the upgrades and new infrastructure” to ensure the steelworks has a sustainable, long-term future, 

Whyalla Steel has forged some of our country’s biggest projects – rail lines, airports and stadiums. We need Whyalla steel.

But is the bailout package enough? SA’s Treasury previously estimated the cost of transforming Whyalla’s steelworks at $3B, and of the $2.4B pledged, some $500m is earmarked for debts, payrolls and other ‘stabilisation’ efforts, leaving a shortfall of at least $1.1B, presumably for the new owner to fork up.

This is by no means the first time ASIC has drawn the ire of a Senator. Last September, Malcolm Roberts expressed serious reservations about the regulator’s investigation of ABC Bullion amid allegations the company charged clients storage fees for metal that wasn’t even in their vaults.

Bullion failures. ASIC disregards Senate and ignores whistleblower evidence

Trading while insolvent is a situation where companies continue to operate and rack up further debts, despite being unable to pay earlier debts when they were due. Penalties under the Corporations Act include a five year ban from managing other corporations and reparations to creditors or liquidators.

Reports estimate GFC’s and One Steel’s debts at more than $300m, while Sanjeev Gupta has a reported net worth of around $2.8B.

A bright green steel future for Australia? What’s the scam?

This post was originally published on Michael West.