My weekly Guardian column is published today: The mine. Photograph: Antony Loewenstein The mine lies like a scar across a bloody face. Guava village sits in a remote area in Bougainville, Papua New Guinea (PNG), above a copper mine which closed 25 years ago. Resistance to the Rio Tinto-owned pit… exploded in the late 1980s… and during…
Articles in The Guardian
Beware the saviours of the new atheists
Here’s my weekly Guardian column (from last week): There’s nothing like an internal critic taking on the most powerful force in his religion. Roy Bourgeois is an American Catholic priest. He’s the founder of… School of the Americas Watch, a group dedicated to closing the US Army School of the Americas – a… military training centre for…
How US/Australia intelligence collusion rightly concerns Asia
My weekly Guardian column is here: Australia has an identity crisis that has never been resolved. Are we a US client state, happy to host any number of… American troops… and… spying assets, or a fully integrated part of Asia? Do we crave true independence, or are we happy to remain America’s ‘deputy sheriff‘ in the Pacific region?…
David Hicks deserves justice, an apology and compensation
My weekly Guardian column is published today: It’s hard to think of an Australian individual since 9/11 who has experienced more humiliation and abandonment by the federal government than… David Hicks. Julian Assange, who declared he felt abandoned by the Australian government, perhaps… comes close. As they both found out, an Australian passport is no guarantee of…
Why it should not be unlawful to offend a person because of their race
Today the Guardian hosts a discussion about the proposed changes to Australia’s Racial Discrimination Act. Writer and academic Alana Lentin argues the laws should remain while I state they need reform: Alana Lentin The right to offend is often held up by liberals everywhere as more important than the right to be offended. But posing…
Why BDS must be supported for justice in the Middle East
My weekly Guardian column is published today: The… boycott, divestment and sanctions… (BDS) movement,… a thriving Palestinian-led initiative… that attacks… institutional links… to Israel’s illegal settlements,… has been… gaining in popularity. In Australia, the movement has been slowly growing… as Israel continues to defy international law – and it now faces one of its greatest opportunities in the court of public opinion. Shurat HaDin…
Australia's treatment of indigenous population akin to apartheid
My weekly Guardian column is published today: Aboriginal levels of incarceration in Australian prisons have never been higher. In fact, country-wide rates of imprisonment are… worse per capita… for the black population than during apartheid South Africa. These numbers are also largely ignored. This silence, which stretches across the country only to reach the highest levels of…
Why tackling fossil fuel corporations is vital for the planet
My weekly Guardian column is published today: The viability of a fossil fuel future is rarely connected to the human rights abuses required to sustain it. How often do we think about where oil and gas is obtained? Are the Europeans or Americans any more aware? This deliberate depoliticisation of our energy present, by the…
Stop drinking the think-tank kool-aid
My weekly column for the Guardian appears today: The ABC TV Lateline interview with Kurt Campbell, former US assistant secretary of state for East Asian and Pacific affairs, was… cordial, even reverential. It was conducted in the middle of March this year, more than a month after Campbell had left the state department. Interviewer Emma Alberici…
US mass surveillance in the Pacific
Here’s my weekly Guardian column published today: What if China was beating the US at its own super-power game in the Pacific and we didn’t even notice? While Washington distracts itself with… shutdown shenanigans… and failed attempts to control the situation in the Middle East, president Obama’s “pivot to Asia”… looks increasingly shaky. Beijing is… quietly filling the gap,…