Showing all posts tagged Australia
ABC Radio National on beards, cider and extreme retro
Sometimes it’s time to talk about issues apart from politics (even for me). I was the guest on yesterday’s ABC Radio National’s Common Knowledge: What’s behind the… kooky ad campaign… featuring two delivery girls on a tandem bicycle and with golden plaits and the faces of bearded men? Who is it targeting and what is the surreal…
BDS is evil/Nazism/terrible/awful/anti-Semitic (but Israel scared of global equal rights campaign)
How’s this for hysteria? Such hyperbole masks a deep insecurity. Israeli occupation of Palestine continues. Daily threats against Iran continues. Apartheid grows in the West Bank. But the real threat, people, is this damned BDS! This story, in Murdoch’s Australian today, shows one thing; bullying is the only way the Zionist lobby and its political…
Helping PNG by leaving the country breath on its own
During my recent visit to Papua New Guinea, I constantly heard complaints about the absurd number of Western advisers who were coming to the country telling locals how to live their lives. It’s a form of neo-colonialism. This is therefore good news: Australia’s international aid agency says it has now saved more than $US90 million…
Wikileaks shows failure of MSM in pursuing real leaks (not officially sanctioned one)
I was recently interviewed for a global series about Wikileaks called Did You Have Any Idea? (part one is here):
Civil strife serious possibility in PNG due to vulture capitalism
My following investigation appears in Crikey today: The story led the business pages in Papua New Guinea’s… Post-Courier… in early February. “Analyst: PNG on verge of change” screamed the headline. British-based market analysts Bdaily Business Network praised the $US17.3 billion Exxon-Mobil led LNG project. “[It] is the most important single development in the history of PNG”, it…
News flash Zionists; Australians increasingly support Palestine
Thoughtful piece in today’s Sydney Morning Herald by Peter Manning. At a time when Israel is increasingly accused of apartheid, and many Western hacks continue visiting the country with the Zionist lobby, the average citizen is smarter than we think: …Polls now show that while Hawke might have reflected Australian attitudes in the 1980s, in…
What the resource curse is doing to Bougainville in Papua New Guinea
My following investigation appears in Crikey today: The rusted air vent is deafening and a whoosh echoes around the pit. Copper-polluted water sits in a pool nearby and trees are starting to take over the graded hillside. Rocky, uneven ground is where locals pan for gold, hoping to find a few grams to make some…
Private eyes are watching us activists
A worrying development in Australia (courtesy of the… Greens): Minister Joe Ludwig, representing the Attorney General in the Senate, confirmed in Question Time today that the Australia Federal Police monitors coal seam gas protesters and that the government outsources some intelligence gathering to private consultants. “Farmers in Queensland trying to protect their land from coal seam…
How Wikileaks must be supported and why
Mainstream support for Wikileaks is often far removed from the daily news cycle. Many journalists seem to feel uncomfortable backing Wikileaks (and Julian Assange) because of his ongoing legal issues, forgetting the key miracle behind the site; the profound challenges to the established information order and exposing the sycophancy between journalists and corporate power. I…