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Australia’s Crony Capitalism: Government Fights Off Move to Shut Loophole for Old-Money Billionaires
By Michael West The Government has grovelled to its billionaire donors yet again, killing a Senate amendment to force the richest Australians to disclose their financial statements. Michael West reports on the crusade by independent senator Rex Patrick to hold the Morrison… Continue Reading →
Professor Jenny Hocking recently won her longstanding campaign for the National Archives of Australia to release the so-called “Palace letters” about the dismissal of Gough Whitlam in 1975. This is her account of that campaign. In August 1975, speaking at… Continue Reading →
By TOTT News Out of all the technologies to emerge in the past couple of decades, facial recognition is one of the most controversial issues. Its benefits come at a price — a price that some deem too great. How… Continue Reading →
By TOTT News Workplaces are looking very different from what they used to, as people begin to return to their jobs after months at home amid the coronavirus lockdown. From mandatory ‘COVID Safe’ guidelines and work-from-home normalities, to online surveillance… Continue Reading →
By Callum Foote with Michael West Media Witness K has been in court, in closed-court proceedings nobody is meant to know about. He is on trial for doing the right thing. With the release of his book, Oil Under Troubled Water,… Continue Reading →
By John Flanagan In terms of human suffering, the Australian public has already paid dearly for the failure to reform outdated, badly administered and inappropriate institutions dealing with family breakdown — and for the failure of governments to take seriously the voices… Continue Reading →
By Gary Dickson of Monash Unversity The Yarram Standard and Great Southern Star, both of which have covered South Gippsland for well over a century, won’t be returning from their coronavirus-enforced suspensions. The two papers are the latest in a… Continue Reading →
By Professor Ramesh Thakur There has been a remarkable lack of observed statistical difference in the rates of death for countries, and for US states, that have and have not locked down. An assessment of the models used to project… Continue Reading →
By Shireen Daft, Macquarie University. In the ongoing protests over the killing of George Floyd and the broader issue of racial injustice, we have been bombarded with images of demonstrators being hit with tear gas and pepper spray. In the… Continue Reading →
With Ethan Nash of TOTT News Two months ago questioning the wisdom of government lockdowns in response to Covid-19 could easily get you banned from Facebook or Twitter. Google executives clearly stated they would be removing what they regarded as… Continue Reading →
By Catherine Waters, University of Kent “Charles Dickens the misogynist”, ran a headline in the Mail on Sunday on May 23 2020, publicising a new book marking the 150th anniversary of his death on June 9 1870. “The novelist was… Continue Reading →
By Professor Ramesh Thakur If ever there was justification for a Royal Commission, this is it. Its primary term of reference should not be to apportion blame, but to identify how we can prepare better for the next big one. With 102… Continue Reading →
By Michelle Fahy with Michael West Media After 28 years with Defence Science and Technology, on Friday 28 October 2016 Dr Tony Lindsay, one of Australia’s most eminent defence scientists, said goodbye. The following Tuesday, 1 November, he started work with… Continue Reading →
By TOTT News Technologies allowing thoughts and feelings to be translated and shared into digital form are already a reality, and in the era of neurocapitalism, your brain will soon require its own rights. In the modern world, brain-computer interfaces… Continue Reading →
By Alex Joske What’s the problem?The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) is strengthening its influence by co‑opting representatives of ethnic minority groups, religious movements, and business, science and political groups. It claims the right to speak on behalf of those groups… Continue Reading →
The role of the Silicon Valley tech companies in manipulating public opinion during the Corona lockdowns has thrown a harsh light straight back on their own conduct. The creation of at scale emotional contagion and high levels of compliance in… Continue Reading →
Alison Whittaker, University of Technology Sydney You probably know the details of the death of George Floyd. He was a doting father and musician. He was killed when a police officer, Derek Chauvin, knelt on his neck for nearly nine… Continue Reading →
By Professor Ramesh Thakur On 5 May, the Norwegian Institute of Public Health published an important report on Norway’s experience of dealing with the Coronavirus crisis. The text that follows is a verbatim extract of the equivalent of the executive… Continue Reading →
Toby Young is a British journalist who became the subject of a media feeding frenzy two years ago after being appointed to an education committee by Theresa May. Within a few weeks he’d lost all of his five board positions… Continue Reading →
By George Grundy with Independent Australia The use of controversial technology developed by Clearview AI by Australian police forces raises serious privacy and human rights concerns. As the Morrison Government continues to avoid scrutiny relating to its curious allocation of sports grants, Home Affairs… Continue Reading →
By Callum Foote with Michael West Media Australia’s banking sector is a haven for government ministers, prime ministers, state premiers and a slew of top bureaucrats. Our Revolving Doors investigation into this most mollycoddled of industries begins today. We expose,… Continue Reading →
By Professor Ramesh Thakur On 26 May, Chief Medical Officer Brendan Murphy said if Australia’s mortality rate matched the UK’s, we’d have had 14,000 Covid-19 deaths. This is just tautological rubbish. It would be just as true and equally pointless to… Continue Reading →
Kristy Hess, Deakin University With swift and savage force, the COVID-19 pandemic has inadvertently attacked Australia’s local news media ecology, which was already battling a weakened immune system. As a researcher working on Australia’s largest academic study into the future… Continue Reading →
By Marie McInerney with Croakey Australian governments are facing renewed calls to dramatically cut the number of people held in prisons and other places of detention that are “potential disaster zones” in the coronavirus pandemic, particularly for Aboriginal and Torres… Continue Reading →
ONE BELONGS TO THE WHOLE WORLD, not just one part of it, Paul Bowles once told an interviewer. Gifted annually with a round-the-world free ticket courtesy of my father’s job as a Captain on Australia’s national carrier Qantas, for a… Continue Reading →
By Callum Foote with Michael West Media The blow-out in Government spending on Defence continues unchecked and unabated despite the coronavirus. The bulk of it goes to multinationals who pay little or no tax in this country. Is nobody watching? Callum Foote looks… Continue Reading →
Extract from Dark Dark Policing Everyone felt like a stranger now. The announcement came, the legendary Kidman properties, spanning three states and the Northern Territory, reportedly some 2.6 per cent of the nation’s land area, 101,000 square kilometres, was being sold… Continue Reading →
Reviewed by John West By most accounts, China has behaved badly through the COVID-19 pandemic. Fascinating insights can be derived about China’s present behaviour by looking into its past. An initial cover up. Punishment of whistle-blowers. Permitting international travel out… Continue Reading →
By Professor Ramesh Thakur The average seasonal flu has a fatality rate of 0.1%. On 5 March, based on the early data from Wuhan in China which had the first cluster of infections and deaths, the World Health Organisation (WHO)… Continue Reading →
By Dr Alison Broinowski A decade ago, WikiLeaks shocked the world with revelations of US war crimes in Iraq and Afghanistan. How Assange’s popular following was reversed, his reputation trashed, and his health ruined is a saga which is still… Continue Reading →
By Michael West This story was originally published on Australia’s leading investigative reporting news site Michael West Media. As the author has written of this story: “Busting the $8 billion property juggernaut Mirvac for rorting JobKeeper this week reminds us… Continue Reading →
Reporters Without Borders on Landmark Ruling on Press Freedom In a much-anticipated verdict Germany’s Federal Constitutional Court has put an end to the groundless mass surveillance of global internet traffic by Germany’s foreign intelligence service, the Bundesnachrichtendienst (BND). The ruling,… Continue Reading →