Australia’s immigration detention system is in chaos and yet the company running them, Serco, is about to be rewarded. Again. The perverse logic of privatisation: The federal government is believed to have signed a contract to outsource the management of defence base operations in the Middle East and Afghanistan to the foreign company running Australia’s…
Showing all posts tagged Murdoch
Obama’s Middle East words as empty as air
My latest article for New Matilda appears today: The US President is delivering sterner speeches on the Israel Palestine conflict but until he bolsters his rhetoric with action, it’s hard to see how progress can be made, writes Antony Loewenstein Forget about what he actually said. Imagine if US President Barack Obama said something like…
Serco must face the music and accountability forced upon it
The role of British multinational Serco in Australia is a murky affair. How much money is the federal government giving them? Can the media and general public get reliable answers from them? Hardly. Yesterday’s Australian editorial touched on this (but of course didn’t acknowledge that inserting the profit motive into detention centres distorts the system):…
Glimpses of Israeli occupation in leading Murdoch space
Now and then, the Australian Murdoch press features a story about Zionist occupation that reveals deep truths about what Palestinians are living through. Their main website (in the travel section) ran the following piece about Hebron yesterday: Mohammed Saadeq has had rocks, bleach and even dead rats thrown at his home but so far it…
More minds switching onto the Serco curse
All power to this campaign: The public’s health will be at risk if the preferred cleaning company for the new Fiona Stanley Hospital gets the $3.2 billion job, the union representing hospital workers claims. United Voice president Dave Kelly claims services company Serco run “dirty and dangerous” hospitals which could endanger people’s health. Serco say…
Supporting Palestinian rights makes you “anti-Israel”
This weekend I’m speaking at the Sydney Palestine conference organised by the Coalition for Justice and Peace in Palestine. I’m talking about the Arab revolutions and their effect on Palestine, the myopic Australian Jewish community and the media’s inability to speak honestly about Palestinians (I’m looking at you, Murdoch press, who seem to believe that…
Bin Laden bled US and continues to do so
Asking questions about the Western obsession with Osama Bin Laden brings spluttering from certain areas of the elite class (indeed, so does saying anything against the glorious Zionist state, as a blogger in today’s Murdoch Australian says I’m polluting the ABC with anti-Israel material. Thank God standing up for Palestinians receives this bile). The real…
Who knew I was a nihilist leftist who loathes Western civilisation?
So I wrote an article for the ABC last week on the murder of Osama Bin Laden. I asked questions about his death, the significance of his assassination, the role of Al-Qaeda in making the US an insanely paranoid security state post 9/11 and the terror leader’s relevance (or otherwise) during the Arab Spring. But…