Australia

Demystifying the Chagos Surrender

Thu, 17 Jul 2025 13:30:19 +1000

The UK Left’s fetish for international law has everything to do with the abandonment of the islands and their residents

The post Demystifying the Chagos Surrender first appeared on Quadrant.

Bruce Pascoe’s Ever-Loyal Tribe

Thu, 17 Jul 2025 04:20:03 +1000

[fusion_dropcap boxed="no" boxed_radius="" class="" id="" color="" hue="" saturation="" lightness="" alpha="" text_color=""]W[/fusion_dropcap]ith another fiscal year ticked over for Bruce Pascoe’s Black Duck Foods charity, it’s time for another look at the Dark Emu cult. Why do Pascoe and his Dark Emu thesis of pre-colonial native farmers continue to thrive despite having lost all credibility? The Black Duck charity must be Australia’s most unusual. It’s the tenant running Pascoe’s 60ha Yumburra Farm at Gipsy Point near Mallacoota. Black Duck picks up all costs for operations and spends cheerfully on improvements to Bruce’s farm. It plants, harvests and markets Bruce’s native seeds, to revive the alleged farming practices of pre-colonial Aborigines. From inception in 2020 to June 30, 2024, the charity acquired $1.36 million from taxpayers and $1.24 million from tax-deductible donations, a total $2.6 million in free funds. By June 2024 it spent all but $220,000, including $149,000 paid in rent to Bruce, $82,000 to buy his old tractor and farmlet odds and sods, and close to $100,000 buying vehicles and their upkeep.[1] Bruce emailed his his fans a year ago, “We urgently need your support… To be honest with you Black Duck Foods is currently living hand to mouth … we need your help to keep going.” (My emphases throughout). When the 2024-25 accounts emerge next January we’ll discover how the project’s getting on, or not getting on. Black Duck’s $2 million-plus outlays since 2020 have generated total farm sales of only $80,000. Hardly surprising as it’s currently pricing its flour from native seeds at $180-360 per kg (depending on volume discounts and species), versus $1.30 for a kilo packet from Woollies today. Pascoe sells his yam daisy seeds for grow-it-yourself fans at 12 cents each. Such tiny seeds run at about 30 per gram, so it’s expensive to scatter them by the handful. Rather than proving the viability of pre-colonial farming, Bruce’s demonstration farm has proved the opposite. The lofty ambition of Bruce as a self-proclaimed Yuin, Bunurong and Tasmanian Aborigine is to convert Australians to native bread loaves and bulrush salads, while validating his Dark Emu thesis of pre-colonial farmer towns housing 1000 citizens apiece, or even, at Lake Condah, Victoria, 10,000 farm and fisher-folk. (Dark Emu, p75). Modern-day towns of that size include Broome, Katoomba and Castlemaine, thankfully all improved with sewerage, public servants, Coles for groceries and Kmarts for winter pyjamas. The real question is how Bruce has got away with his thesis – rather, won laurels for it -- for more than a decade. Reasons include

Dark Emu’s purported history dovetails with today’s Aboriginality-obsessions and loathing of Australia’s British settlement

Endorsement of Pascoe by Melbourne University, rated in THE rankings as 39th in the world. Pascoe in 2020 was appointed the university’s Enterprise Professor. That’s a title it previously reserved for titans of industry and the professions. His full and bizarre title is “Enterprise Professor in Indigenous Agriculture.”

The prospective humiliation of the ABC and ignominy for the entire left-wing establishment if/when they finally acknowledge that Pascoe’s claims are worthless

[fusion_dropcap boxed="no" boxed_radius="" class="" id="" color="" hue="" saturation="" lightness="" alpha="" text_color=""]A[/fusion_dropcap]nother factor sustaining the Dark Emu religion is the left’s embarrassment that right-of-centre pundit Andrew Bolt and Quadrant’s Keith Windschuttle and Peter O’Brien were first to reveal Pascoe as an emperor with no clothes. Archaeologists Martin Porr and Ella Vivian-Williams admitted in 2021,

“In an often poisonous and polarising Culture War atmosphere, most archaeologists will not hesitate for even a second to decide on which side they want to be. Despite Dark Emu’s many flaws, archaeologists do not want to provide ammunition to right-wing commentators and damage Pascoe’s contributions to the wider project of Aboriginal reconciliation and recognition.” [2].

Since veteran academics Peter Sutton and Keryn Walshe published their refutation “Farmers or Hunter-gatherers? The Dark Emu Debate” (MUP) four years ago, Pascoe has no leg to stand on. Yet he’s still venerated by the intellectual/literary class. Dark Emu sales exceed 400,000. The number of schoolkids brainwashed with Dark Emu since 2014 runs to millions. In contrast to Dark Emu, the Sutton-Walshe refutation has gained no real traction. Sutton is an anthropologist of the old school, with 50 years work in the field and fluency in three Cape York languages. Keryn Walshe is an archaeologist of 35 years experience with Indigenous sites and 53 publications. (Incidentally Walshe puts Aboriginal settlement at 50,000 years[3], not the 65,000 years or more beloved by “truth-tellers”. Pascoe claims 120,000 years). Both authors are of Left but unable to stomach Pascoe’s output. Still, they’re also happy to dismiss in just one mention Quadrant’s ground-breaking Bitter Harvest book on Pascoe (2019), dismissing it “a pugnacious, polemical assessment”. Bitter Harvest author Peter O’Brien is a science graduate, Vietnam war platoon commander, later Lt. Colonel and businessman. He documents across 250 pages Pascoe’s distortions and manipulations of the source material from first-contact explorers. O’Brien provides a book’s worth of correctives to Pascoe’s sources, compared with only 14 pages of this material from Peter Sutton, much of it canvassed by O’Brien two years earlier. (order Bitter Harvest here) The bulk of the Sutton-Walshe book deploys their deep expertise in Aboriginal history, culture and lifestyle to demonstrate that Pascoe has virtually no evidence for his “farmer” speculations, other than treating aberrations as the norm. Sutton-Walshe should have been the end of the Dark Emu farrago. But instead their book has dropped from sight after a few reviews, some laudatory, some equivocal. ABC Education executives, well aware that Sutton-Walshe has destroyed their idol, have tacked a few cautious lines onto Part One of their 14-part Pascoe series., e.g.

“Since 2019, Pascoe's work has been evaluated differently by some people, who don't agree with his interpretations of historical sources.”

The ABC refers kids of age 6 upwards to the densely-intellectual Sutton-Walshe book and reviews of it, all written for adult professionals. This is how the ABC pays lip service to its legislated “impartiality” charter. Here's what Sutton-Walshe actually conclude about Dark Emu, after compiling a litany of evidence: “Pascoe is an armchair theorist.” (p88). “[Dark Emu] is littered with unsourced material. It is poorly researched. It distorts and exaggerates many old sources. It selects evidence to suit the author’s opinions, and it ignores large bodies of information that do not support the author’s opinions. It contains a large number of factual errors, a range of which we analyse here. Others we could not include for want of space.” (p39). “Put in this distorted and simplistic form, the message [of pre-colonial farming] serves only to seriously mislead secondary students.” (p170) “Dark Emu is actually not, properly considered, a work of scholarship. Its success as a narrative has been achieved in spite of its failure as an account of fact.” (p39) “To claim [the lifestyle] was ‘agricultural’ is to stretch the facts on a gigantic scale.” (p114) Dark Emu shows “either a profound lack of factual knowledge in relation to the peoples and history written about in Dark Emu, or an unconcern with facts and truth themselves, or a combination of these things. Whichever the case, the situation is troubling.” (p39) “Pascoe is some fifty years behind the scholarly discussions that have traversed Australia.” (p266) “The danger is that some of those who began reading Dark Emu in a state of even partially reliable knowledge may have now become enamoured of its sweeping, simplified and distorted mythological history and are thus newly misled.” (p193) The authors say the paucity of Pascoe’s evidence

“suggests an almost desperate search to find something to back up the belief that the Old People sowed seeds for crops and were thus agricultural people. This overstretching of inadequate evidence actually reinforces the general picture of an absence of crop cultivation in mainland Australia before conquest.” (p127)

Sutton, who wrote the bulk of the book, complains that Pascoe quotes white explorers freely,

“but not the words of traditional owners of Aboriginal land, and only occasionally the reports of those who have carried out in-depth research on Aboriginal traditions with living Aboriginal people … Pascoe does not appear to have ever probed the agriculture or gardening issue with senior and knowledgeable Aboriginal people who grew up living off the land, or whose older family members did.” (p87-88)

[fusion_dropcap boxed="no" boxed_radius="" class="" id="" color="" hue="" saturation="" lightness="" alpha="" text_color=""]P[/fusion_dropcap]ascoe’s distortions include labelling a domed and well-crafted Melanesian dwelling from the Torres Strait as an Aboriginal house:

“In the second edition of Dark Emu, the image was replaced by a photograph of the framework of the same hut minus the grass thatching. In Young Dark Emu both the hut and the framework are shown as ‘dome house’, with no note that it is Melanesian and not Aboriginal. (p161)

Sutton occasionally loses his temper: “I have been to Lake Torrens and its vast salt flats with its traditional owners. The suggestion, if that is what Pascoe intends, that anyone could practise ‘sedentary agriculture’ in that blasted desert environment is simply ill informed.” (p205). The authors finish (p270-271)

“There is no better condition for relationships than truthfulness. We have tried here to set part of the record straighter than it has become through the popularised mythology of history of the kind found in Dark Emu. We have done so in a positive spirit, but also a corrective one. The Old People—the First Australians—and all of us deserve better than a history that does not respect or do justice to the societies whose economic and spiritual adjustment to their environment lasted so well and so vigorously until the advent of the colonies and the subsequent degradation of much of that environment through land clearing, pastoral stocking, and the spread of feral animals and plants…

“In this book we have grappled with Dark Emu’s mixture of positive factual information and its tendency to trim the evidence to fit the author’s model, its lack of true scholarship, its ignoring of Aboriginal elders’ knowledge, its disturbing social evolutionist philosophy, and its overwhelming attention to the material aspects of Aboriginal food production to the exclusion of the rich spiritual propagation philosophy of the Old People’s culture.

[fusion_dropcap boxed="no" boxed_radius="" class="" id="" color="" hue="" saturation="" lightness="" alpha="" text_color=""]P[/fusion_dropcap]ascoe has himself disclosed his agenda for classrooms as his pathway to get the 2024 Referendum reversed.

If we weren’t going to change the minds of those old white fascists, we had to talk to their children and grandchildren. And that’s what we’re doing now. Two of my most recent books have been books on Dark Emu and agriculture and forestry. But in children’s versions. And these books are going out into schools. And of course the fascists say that I’ve invented it [pre-colonial agriculture] and I’m corrupting children. But this is what we have to do…You don’t find any children under the age of ten who can’t see the logic of what has happened in this country. Understanding implicitly that there was a war and that black people lost it. And that there needs to be reparation.

The kids understand this because it’s natural justice. It’s just their grandfathers [who are resisting], although a couple of cranky grandmothers [resist] as well. It’s the grandfathers who were so vicious.

Interviewer: And this is also a reminder that all education is political.[4]

I have no problem with Pascoe earning laurels, often richly deserved, for his short stories, novels, memoirs and encouragement of Australian writers. But his tendentious “history” has done, and continues to do, huge damage to how Australians see themselves and their sense of pride and worth. Pascoe and his thesis would have fizzled out but for what the French know as the ‘treason of the intellectuals’ – particularly those ensconced in education and the ABC. Tony Thomas’s latest book, Anthem of the Unwoke – Yep the other lot’s gone bonkers is available from Connor Court, $34.95 [1] Aggregates from annual filings at the Charities Commission [2] Australian Archaeology, 2021, Vol. 87, No. 3, 300–304 [3] Sutton & Walshe, p274 [4] Green Dreamer podcast, 11/12/24 Episode 438: Pascoe: Respecting and falling in love with the land.

The post Bruce Pascoe’s Ever-Loyal Tribe first appeared on Quadrant.

The Creeping Reach of International Law

Thu, 17 Jul 2025 00:40:10 +1000

If national democracy is to be maintained in any recognisable form within self-sustaining states, the power and claims of international rule-making will have to decline. —Harry Gelber, Quadrant, October 2015

... since the end of the Cold War the notion of global governance has emerged as an intellectual orthodoxy with powerful support in the academy, the media, the law, the foreign policy establishment, the corporate world, and the bureaucracies that serve international institutions and non-governmental associations.

Global governance is a reversal of our existing political arrangements. It aims to take power from democratically elected parliaments and vest it in courts, NGOs and transnational bodies. Voters would increasingly find their representatives beholden to international treaties, international legal conventions and precedents, transnational bureaucrats and lawyers. Government policy would be decided less by open debate in the national media and more in the comparatively closed world of international conferences, academic seminars, consultant reports, learned journals and legal judgments. —Keith Windschuttle, Quadrant, May 2012

_______________

[fusion_dropcap boxed="no" boxed_radius="" class="" id="" color="" hue="" saturation="" lightness="" alpha="" text_color=""]T[/fusion_dropcap]he expanding reach of a fuzzy sort of rights-related international law is enervating democracy in long-established democracies such as Australia, Canada, New Zealand and the United Kingdom. And the courts are playing a significant role in advancing this agenda of global governance, or creeping international legal rule. We should be more sceptical about international law when it deals with human rights, considerably more so than when it deals with more traditional subject matter (such as international trade law and the law of diplomatic immunity). It is worth beginning by recalling just what the sources of international law are and how this sort of law is made. In a long-established democracy such as Australia or New Zealand or Britain it is also worth considering whether international law or domestic law is likely to be the one that gets things right and lays down the preferable course of action when the two conflict or are in some way inconsistent.

From our September 2016 issue. Click here to subscribe

There are two sources or types of international law. The first is treaties (sometimes called conventions). This is what most people, including most lawyers, think of when one talks of international law. Now focus for a moment on rights-related treaties such as the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child (CRC) or the United Nations Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (CRPD) or any of the various other rights-related treaties. All treaties are entered into under the prerogative power which is exercised by the executive branch of government. Accordingly, even with some newish modifications that give the legislature a tiny bit of say in some Westminster countries, the democratic input into treaties is far less than it is into statutes. That is true of all treaties. But as we are focused on rights-related treaties, notice that these treaties are framed in vague and amorphous terms (just compare either of the above rights-related conventions to a trade-related treaty such as the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT). This makes sense in a world in which a Britain or a Canada is seeking to encourage a Sudan or a China or a Zimbabwe to enter into a treaty about standards of treatment for children or women or the disabled. There needs to be room to finesse disagreement between countries with such different histories and standards of treating their own citizens, and that is precisely what the language of these rights-related treaties and conventions delivers—scope not only for disagreement over meaning between countries that exist in such different moral galaxies but, as a result, also scope for reasonable disagreement between people living in a long-established democracy as to what the provisions mean and require. If such rights-related treaties went into the sort of prescriptive detail one finds in, say, a trade-related treaty, then the chances of any rights-related treaty ever coming into existence would be slight. So room has been left in rights-related treaties for countries to manoeuvre around disagreements, and this is achieved through open-textured provisions that leave it to future interpreters to add detail and specifics at the point of application—at the further cost of democratic input and legitimacy when this interpreting is done. And if the interpretive approach adopted proves to be of an expansionist, “living tree” type, divorced from the original intentions of the drafters, then the problem of lack of democratic input will be further magnified—possibly substantially so. Put simply, if you believe that democratic input tends to make laws better, on average, over time, then you are likely to think that the domestic law of an Anglosphere country is better than any rights-related international treaty or convention when the two conflict or are inconsistent. (You can hold this belief while also believing that it will not be true as regards the world’s authoritarian regimes. In their cases, international law is better. And you can hold all of the above to be true and also accept that the world’s United Kingdoms and Australias care deeply about the content of rights-related treaties.) [fusion_dropcap boxed="no" boxed_radius="" class="" id="" color="" hue="" saturation="" lightness="" alpha="" text_color=""]P[/fusion_dropcap]ut bluntly, the domestic law of Britain, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, the United States and other such long-established democracies is democratically better and in practice more rights-respecting than is rights-related international law, a claim that seems to me to be as patently true as it is unlikely to be heard in polite company. For me, democracy is to be understood in procedural terms. Count us all as equal and give everyone a more or less equal say over contested social issues, including rights-related ones. On that procedural understanding of democracy, the domestic laws of the world’s Britains and New Zealands and Australias clearly score higher than any rights-related international laws. The second source or type of international law is known as customary international law. If treaties and conventions are democratically deficient in comparison with the statutes passed by parliament, then customary international law comes close to not having a single democratic bone in its body. This is the non-treaty-based sort of international law (though in some instances customary international law can flow on from treaties). It has never been agreed to by any democratically elected and accountable legislators or even members of the executive branch. Its content cannot be found in a treaty, ratified or not, but rather is inferred from the practice of states. Once a consistent and general practice of states has been identified, and this general practice is held to be something that was followed out of a sense of legal obligation, then it becomes part of customary international law. Who does this identifying and deciding about what states are doing and what their motives are? The answer is: publicists. Many of those falling into the category of publicists are legal academics or law professors. Not all law professors however. You have to be someone who is knowledgeable and writes on international law, so someone with technical mastery of the field. But you also have to demonstrate to those already recognised as being highly qualified publicists that you have what Harvard Law School law professor Mark Tushnet describes as “soundness”. No one gets to vote for these legal academic publicists. They have no democratic warrant at all. As a group they may well have political and moral views that diverge from those of the general public. Those sceptical of the benefits of international law are excluded. This matters much more today than it may have in the past when customary international law concerned itself solely with the “law of nations”, and when in many ways it was a practical and relatively focused source of law. These days, however, this subsidiary branch of international law has expanded its reach into the realm of how a nation-state treats its own citizens. Hence, when you focus on who makes this sort of law you again might wonder if it is likely to produce better results than what flows from a democratically elected parliament. That doubt remains as regards the other main group of people who make customary international law, the international judges. Consider the fifteen Justices on the United Nations’ International Court of Justice (ICJ), about a third to a half of whom come from non-democracies. Consider, too, the horse-trading that takes place at the General Assembly to select ICJ judges, a method that can be described as opaque. Or consider that the traditional task in international customary law—the quest to find the actual practices of nation-states—now contends with a newer, “modern” approach that can substitute statements by nation-states for actually engaging in a practice. This subsidiary sort of international law is on the whole opaque and is considerably more undemocratic than even the treaty-based sort, which itself has far fewer democratic credentials and is less transparent than the domestic law of long-established democracies. [fusion_dropcap boxed="no" boxed_radius="" class="" id="" color="" hue="" saturation="" lightness="" alpha="" text_color=""]T[/fusion_dropcap]wo final background points are worth making as regards the rights-related international law regime. At the pinnacle of all talk about rights-related international law sits the UN Human Rights Council (UNHRC). The UNHRC currently includes Cuba, China, Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, Venezuela and the UAE, with Kyrgyzstan, Togo, Ecuador and Ethiopia amongst those also elected to three-year terms beginning in October. Saudi Arabia was recently elected as Chair of the Council’s Advisory Committee, and so will be highly influential in the appointing of alleged experts to address various problem areas in human rights. As it happens, there has never been a single UNHRC resolution (or UN General Assembly resolution related to rights-infringement either) against Saudi Arabia for human rights abuses. There have, though, been more of both of those sorts of resolutions against Israel than against all other countries combined. The UNHRC (and the General Assembly) see Israel as more rights-infringing than the combined record of all other countries on earth! All this needs to be kept front-and-centre when criticisms regarding rights-respectingness are levelled against long-established democracies. The same general point applies, too, as regards the various committees that monitor each of the rights-related UN conventions such as the CRC and CRPD. A good deal of scepticism is warranted when these committees allege that Australia or Britain has fallen short in some rights-related way, or indeed when they make any sweeping rights-related claims. These types of rights issues are inevitably open to reasonable disagreement; the people who staff these committees (and the representatives of the countries on the UNHRC) have no greater moral insights or moral perspicacity than the average voter or parliamentarian, and they have massively less democratic legitimacy than the latter. That leads on to the second background point to bear in mind. In recent years, what might be described as slippage has taken place in terms of what exactly falls under the aegis of international law. The number and range of treaties keep expanding—more and more claimed rights (of, say, indigenous peoples, the disabled, the environment, to say nothing of social and economic rights) are trading under the banner of rights-related international law. The pseudo-progressive practice of international human rights law has real costs in terms of human rights themselves. How can international law influence domestic law? Here I will offer a brief reminder of the ways in which international law might, and occasionally does, influence domestic law. I will arrange these on a spectrum moving from least controversial (that is, most in keeping with orthodoxy) to most controversial. The purpose is to give the reader some basis against which to evaluate the recent judicial developments we will look at shortly. Starting with the traditional understanding of international law at the orthodox end of the spectrum of influence, we have treaties which have been incorporated into domestic law (that is, explicitly introduced into the legal system by means of a statute). There is nothing controversial about this type of treaty-made-into-statute situation. Moving along the spectrum, we now push into territory where the focus is on ratified (but not incorporated) treaties that are used by judges to influence their interpretation of domestic law. This, in all its permutations, is more controversial than where a treaty has in fact been incorporated into domestic law. However, the extent of the novelty or breach with orthodoxy varies and is open to reasonable disagreement. Least vulnerable to democratic objections are instances in which regulations or other secondary legislation are being interpreted (or actions by ministers and others reviewed) and there is ambiguity as to the meaning of the legal text (when the normal interpretive approach is adopted). Given the ambiguity of the secondary legislation, and only after a determination of such ambiguity, the judge then turns to the relevant ratified (but not incorporated) treaty to see if it helps resolve the ambiguity. Think of this as possibility 1. [fusion_dropcap boxed="no" boxed_radius="" class="" id="" color="" hue="" saturation="" lightness="" alpha="" text_color=""]F[/fusion_dropcap]urther along, the same scenario plays out in relation to primary legislation—a statute is being interpreted. Again, there is ambiguity when the usual canons of statutory interpretation are employed and the judge appeals to a ratified (but not incorporated) treaty as a possible determining factor. This is possibility 2. Next we have instances in which the judge is interpreting regulations or other secondary legislation (or reviewing actions by ministers and others), but here the appeal to a ratified, unincorporated treaty is made without any prior finding of ambiguity when just the usual interpretive resources have been relied upon. Clearly the ratified treaty is now playing a larger (and earlier and more influential) role in determining outcomes as to the meaning of domestic law. This will include instances where the treaty is, in effect, providing enough sway to over-ride (by way of interpretation) an unambiguous domestic regulation. This is possibility 3. Next is the same scenario but this time it is primary legislation being interpreted. There is no ambiguity as regards the statute here, and yet the judge consults the ratified, unincorporated treaty in reaching a decision about the meaning of the legislation. This is possibility 4. In possibilities 1 through 4 on our spectrum, we have only considered ratified (but not incorporated) treaties in asking about the influence of international law. Yes, there is some room for debate on whether, in terms of veering from orthodoxy when it comes to the role of international law, we ought to swap or flip possibilities 2 and 3—this would depend upon the priority given to either the lack of ambiguity or the difference between (and therefore the relative importance of) secondary and primary legislation. The above spectrum treats the absence of ambiguity as the weightier consideration, on the basis that this can lead to situations in which it would appear to the outside observer that international law is trumping domestic law. But for the purposes of this discussion, nothing hangs on any rearrangement of the spectrum by flipping these two possibilities. Notice, though, that thus far we have only considered how treaties might be of indirect effect, that is, how they might influence the interpretation a judge puts on a provision of domestic law. Of course what use judges ought to be able to make of these unincorporated treaties is contentious, contestable and will result in varying indirect effects on the scope of parliamentary decision-making power. Yet thus far there is no overt tension between the use a judge is making of international law and the core constitutional principle that acts of parliament (and indeed common law legal rules) are of a higher standing than any source of international law. Each of the first four possibilities can be criticised on democratic grounds—and to varying degrees on grounds related to orthodoxy. But they make no explicit assertion that international law is of equal or greater standing (or legitimacy) than domestic law. Possibility 5 makes just that assertion. Here we make a big jump on our spectrum to the claim that unincorporated treaty provisions can be directly enforceable in domestic law—meaning that they are treated as being of the same status or type as treaty provisions that have been passed by parliament into statute. So possibility 5 is certainly nowhere near the orthodox position; it is, instead, somewhat revolutionary and to an extent undermines parliamentary sovereignty (though it leaves open to parliament room to pass statutes explicitly diverging from or countermanding the judges’ interpretation of some aspect of rights-related international law—the issue being why the onus should be on parliament to be explicit and why the default presumption should be in favour of international law in this judicially contrived manner). Nor is it in the slightest bit evident what legitimate basis any judge has for allowing international law to influence—nay, to be directly enforceable as a part of—domestic law in the manner of possibility 5. There is no democratic warrant for it at all. Enumerating those five possibilities across a “least controversial” to “most controversial” spectrum should help illustrate the ways in which international law might influence the domestic law of Australia or the United Kingdom. And this sort of creeping expansion of the influence of international law is more apparent in the UK than here. Consider four cases, all in the last five years. In some the government prevails; in some it loses; in some the result is mixed. The cases concern deportation, extradition and the provision of benefits of differing types. As a package, these cases provide illustrations of judges invoking possibilities 1 to 5 above. They show how the UK’s top judges might allow international law to influence domestic law. The trend is not encouraging. ZH (Tanzania) v Secretary of State for the Home Department was an appeal from a failed asylum seeker. At issue was the interpretation of two statutes. The CRC (a ratified treaty but not one incorporated into domestic law) was used by the judges ultimately, if circuitously, to influence the interpretation of the statutory provisions and block the deportation. Notice two of the judicial comments here. First, article 3(1) of the CRC “is a binding obligation in international law, and the spirit, if not the precise language, has also been translated into our national law” (emphasis added). Second, that article’s “best interests of the child” provision is a factor or consideration that, while not of “limitless importance … must rank higher than any other” (emphasis added). Both passages in italics stand for propositions that inflate the reach of international law. [fusion_dropcap boxed="no" boxed_radius="" class="" id="" color="" hue="" saturation="" lightness="" alpha="" text_color=""]T[/fusion_dropcap]hen there is a case involving three extradition decisions under the European Arrest Warrant system. As with virtually all UK case law, European considerations are involved. Two of the three appeals against extradition were rejected, while one was allowed. And again this unincorporated treaty is central to the judges’ reasoning, this time as regards extradition decisions. The other two cases involve welfare benefits of one sort or another. The government wins one and loses one. The trend gets worse. More inroads into democratic decision-making are signalled as being likely in the near to medium future. Indeed there are dissenting judgments that clearly opt for possibility 5 above, a radical redrawing of the relations between domestic law and international law. In R (on the application of SG and others) v Secretary of State for Work and Pensions, the third of our illustrative cases, the Supreme Court splits three-to-two in the government’s favour. The immediate issue was the government’s household benefit cap, introduced by the Welfare Reform Act 2012 and implemented by regulation, namely the Benefit Cap (Housing Benefit) Regulations 2012. Given that this cap disproportionately affected women, and given that women tend to do more of the child-caring duties, a key issue was whether the implementation of this cap (

A Defining Talent for Deletion

Wed, 16 Jul 2025 15:04:54 +1000

If a Stalinist-level denial of reality is the first leftist tactic, the instant worship of a new leader — as we saw in the Biden–Harris swap — is a close second

The post A Defining Talent for Deletion first appeared on Quadrant.

Pascoe’s Pals at the Copyright Agency

Wed, 16 Jul 2025 05:46:08 +1000

Most authors make little from their writing. So why is the body assigned to distribute royalties using that cash to promote a fauxborigine scammer?

The post Pascoe’s Pals at the Copyright Agency first appeared on Quadrant.

The Persistence of War in Human Affairs

Wed, 16 Jul 2025 05:02:20 +1000

A profound deficiency in the study of war is an electorate lacking a proper understanding of the inseparable linkage between human nature and the nature of war

The post The Persistence of War in Human Affairs first appeared on Quadrant.

Why Muslims Hate Dogs

Wed, 16 Jul 2025 00:33:00 +1000

[fusion_dropcap boxed="no" boxed_radius="" class="" id="" color="" hue="" saturation="" lightness="" alpha="" text_color=""]F[/fusion_dropcap]or some time now, a horse has been catching a public bus in Dearborn, Michigan. It is a little horse, certainly, and it is in the company of a woman. The woman is blind and the horse is her seeing-eye horse.¹ A seeing-eye horse? Why not a seeing-eye dog? Well, because the woman is a Muslim, a devout Muslim, and so she believes that dogs are impure. The presence of horses on buses is just one way that Muslim superstition about dogs is impacting life in Western nations. Another is the objection to seeing-eye dogs in taxis.

From our September 2010 issue. Click here to subscribe

In recent years there have been many reports of Muslim taxi drivers who have refused to transport blind people accompanied by guide dogs. For example, the Sunday Herald Sun reported on 6 October 2006 that at least 20 blind people in Melbourne had lodged discrimination complaints against Muslim taxi drivers for refusing to carry them with their guide dogs. A spokeswoman for Guide Dogs Victoria said that “blind people regularly reported taxi drivers refusing to carry them because of their dogs.”² The Daily Telegraph reported on 24 May 2007 that the mistreatment of the blind by some Muslim taxi drivers in Sydney had been exposed by none other than the NSW Human Rights and Disability Discrimination Commissioner. Commissioner Graeme Innes, who is himself blind and reliant on a guide dog, said that “he was refused service on average once a month”. On a number of occasions taxi drivers had told him that it was against their Islamic religion to allow dogs into their taxis. In support of Commissioner Innes’ complaint, a spokesman for Vision Australia said, “It is fair to say that the (Islamic) religion has made the problem worse in the metropolitan areas than regional areas”. The NSW Government was so concerned about the problem that it introduced a fine of $1,100 for any driver who refused service to a blind person with a guide dog.³ Unfortunately, the threat of fines is unlikely to make Muslim drivers comply with the law. In October 2006, for example, a London taxi driver, Abdul Rasheed Majekodumni, refused to transport a blind woman because he considered her guide dog to be “unclean”. When the woman later complained to Abdul’s employer, she was told that she “should have more respect for other people’s culture”! A magistrate took a different view and found Abdul guilty of infringing the regulations of the Disability Discrimination Act and imposed a hefty fine. Nonetheless, after the case, Abdul “remained defiant and insisted that he would continue refusing passengers accompanied by guide dogs.”⁴ Some Muslim taxi drivers try to evade the law by feigning a medical condition. Late last year a UK taxi driver, Ali Raza Roshanmoniri, told a blind man “I can’t take your guide dog, it’s against my religion”. The following day, Ali lodged a doctor’s letter with his local council’s taxi licensing department stating that he was allergic to animal hair and consequently could not carry dogs. But the council was not fooled and it prosecuted him.⁵ Another UK taxi driver, Sallahaddin Abdullah, refused to take a blind couple, saying, “Sorry, I sneeze; my religion.” If only he had not made the second statement, he might have got away with the first.⁶ Another way for taxi drivers to avoid their legal obligation to serve the blind is simply to drive on the moment they see a guide dog. The chief executive of Seeing Eye Dogs Australia said, “I watch our patrons out my window and see taxis drive past them and the person who’s blind doesn’t even know they’ve gone by. It’s just appalling.”⁷ Restaurants run by Muslims in the West are also becoming restricted areas for the blind. The Ottawa Sun (Canada) reported in February 2008 that “a Muslim restaurant owner refused to serve a blind woman who entered the restaurant with her guide dog, telling her, ‘I’m not allowed.’”⁸ The Telegraph (UK) reported in December 2008 that a blind man was denied entry to a Muslim-run restaurant, despite showing an official card certifying that his guide dog was permitted access to all public premises. “I was made to feel like a piece of dirt,” the blind man said. “They told me I couldn’t come in because it was against their religious beliefs to have a dog in the restaurant.”⁹ And it is not just the blind in the West who are finding themselves oppressed by sharia law regarding dogs. Last year the Scottish police force upset some Muslims by using a puppy in an advertisement. Posters and postcards were distributed in Dundee to inform the public of a new police phone number, and for visual appeal they featured a black German Shepherd puppy sitting in a policeman’s hat. A Muslim councillor, Mohammed Asif, said: “My concern was that it’s not welcomed by all communities, with the dog on the cards. … They (the police) should have understood. Since then, the police have explained that it was an oversight on their part, and that if they’d seen it was going to cause upset they wouldn’t have done it.” Indeed, a police spokesman grovelled: “We did not seek advice from the force’s diversity adviser prior to publishing and distributing the postcards. That was an oversight and we apologise for any offence caused.”¹⁰ Puppies on postcards are the least of the British police force’s problems concerning dogs and Muslims. Sniffer dogs at railway stations are an even greater affront to Muslim sensibilities. The Daily Express stated last year that

Police sniffer dogs trained to spot terrorists at railway stations may no longer come into contact with Muslim passengers—after complaints that it is against the suspects’ religion. A report for the Transport Department has raised the prospect that the animals should only touch passengers’ luggage because it is considered ‘more acceptable’.” Insisting that it would continue to use sniffer dogs indiscriminately to detect explosives, the Transport Police nonetheless declared that its dog handlers would be mindful of “cultural sensitivities.¹¹

[fusion_dropcap boxed="no" boxed_radius="" class="" id="" color="" hue="" saturation="" lightness="" alpha="" text_color=""]C[/fusion_dropcap]ultural sensitivity towards people whose religious ideology includes jihad, holy war, against anyone who does not revere their Prophet, Muhammad, and worship their God, Allah? Given that increased railway security in London is the direct result of the suicide bombings of three trains in London in 2005 by Muslim terrorists (not to mention the suicide bombings of four trains by Muslim terrorists in Madrid in 2004), surely Muslim citizens should be the last to object to—and the last to be given an apology for—any measure deemed necessary to detect explosives being smuggled into railway stations! On another matter to do with Muslims, dogs and police in Britain, the Association of Chief Police Officers has drawn up guidelines urging police to be aware of “religious sensitivities when using dogs to search for drugs and explosives” in mosques and Muslim homes. “Where Muslims object, officers will be obliged to use sniffer dogs only in exceptional cases. Where dogs are used, they will have to wear bootees with rubber soles.” Seriously!¹² So, what is it about dogs that sends Muslims barking mad? Don’t bother looking in the Koran: the answer is not there. Dogs are mentioned only twice in the Koran, and neither reference explains the Muslim hatred of dogs. The first reference involves a simile, likening the man who rejects Allah’s signs to a panting dog:

Relate to them the story of the man to whom We sent Our signs, but he passed them by: so Satan followed him up, and he went astray. If it had been Our will, We should have elevated him with Our signs; but he inclined to the earth, and followed his own vain desires. His similitude is that of a dog: if you attack him, he lolls out his tongue, or if you leave him alone, he (still) lolls out his tongue. That is the similitude of those who reject Our signs; So relate the story; perchance they may reflect. (7:175-176, tr. Yusuf Ali)¹³

Even if we construe this first reference to dogs in the Koran as negative, it is not seriously negative. Our contempt is directed not to dogs but to men who are as nonchalant and uncomprehending as dogs. The dog in the comparison is merely being doggy, which is fine for a dog; the man in the comparison is also being doggy, which is not fine for a man. The second Koranic reference to dogs is a literal reference to a dog that companioned several faithful young men whom Allah supposedly preserved in sleep in a cave for 300 years:

Behold, the youths betook themselves to the Cave: they said, “Our Lord! bestow on us Mercy from Thyself, and dispose of our affair for us in the right way!” Then We drew (a veil) over their ears, for a number of years, in the Cave, (so that they heard not) … Thou wouldst have deemed them awake, whilst they were asleep, and We turned them on their right and on their left sides: their dog stretching forth his two fore-legs on the threshold: if thou hadst come up on to them, thou wouldst have certainly turned back from them in flight, and wouldst certainly have been filled with terror of them. … (Some) say they were three, the dog being the fourth among them; (others) say they were five, the dog being the sixth, doubtfully guessing at the unknown; (yet others) say they were seven, the dog being the eighth. Say thou: “My Lord knoweth best their number; it is but few that know their (real case).” Enter not, therefore, into controversies concerning them, except on a matter that is clear, nor consult any of them about (the affair of) the Sleepers. (18:10-11, 18, 22, tr. Yusuf Ali)

This second and last reference to dogs in the Koran seems to be quite positive. The dog is the companion of faithful Muslim youths, and is numbered with them. It is preserved by Allah along with the youths for 300 years in the cave, and it may even have kept guard over them for that time. There is no hint of abhorrence here. [fusion_dropcap boxed="no" boxed_radius="" class="" id="" color="" hue="" saturation="" lightness="" alpha="" text_color=""]I[/fusion_dropcap]f not the Koran, then what explains the Muslim antipathy to dogs? As with the majority of Islamic superstitions, regulations and practices, the explanation for it lies in the Hadith, that body of Islamic holy literature that records the words and deeds of the Prophet Muhammad. In his last sermon, Muhammad said, “I leave behind me two things, the Qur’an and my Sunnah and if you follow these you will never go astray.”¹⁴ The Sunnah is the Prophet’s manner of life, and it is recorded in the Hadith.¹⁵ And the Hadith records Muhammad’s attitudes and teachings on dogs. This is the source of Muslim loathing for dogs. There are many canonical hadiths (Arabic plural, “ahadith”) about Muhammad and dogs. And they reveal that Muhammad, the perfect Muslim and the perfect model for all Muslims, disliked dogs intensely and was extremely superstitious about them. Sometime after emigrating from Mecca to Medina, Muhammad ordered his followers to kill the dogs of the city:

Allah’s Apostle ordered that the dogs should be killed. (Bukhari, Vol 4, Bk 54, No 540)

Ibn Umar reported Allah’s Messenger giving command for killing dogs. (Muslim, Bk 10, No 3809)

Always eager to obey, Muhammad’s men applied themselves with enthusiasm to the slaughter of Medina’s dogs:

Allah’s Messenger ordered the killing of dogs and we would send (men) in Medina and its corners and we did not spare any dog that we did not kill, so much so that we killed the dog that accompanied the wet she-camel belonging to the people of the desert. (Muslim, Bk 10, No 3811)

Muhammad’s order had unforeseen and unfortunate consequences. In their zeal, his canine hit men killed the working dogs of herders and shepherds who happened to be visiting Medina. To avert trouble, Muhammad partially rescinded his order: The Prophet of Allah ordered [us] to kill dogs, and we were even killing a dog which a woman brought with her from the desert. Afterwards he forbade [us] to kill them, saying: Confine yourselves to the type which is black. (Abu-Dawud, Bk 16, No 2840; cf Muslim, Bk 10, No 3813) To further placate the people of Medina and its surrounds, Muhammad even declared it acceptable to keep dogs for agricultural purposes:

Allah’s Messenger ordered the killing of dogs and then said: what is the trouble with them (the people of Medina)? How are dogs nuisances to them? He then permitted keeping of dogs for hunting and (the protection of) herds. (Muslim, Bk 10, No 3814)

While conceding that dogs could be kept in certain circumstances, Muhammad nonetheless prohibited their sale. He declared it unlawful to receive a payment for a dog and maintained that such payments were detestable:

The Prophet forbade payment for dog and cat. (Abu-Dawud, Bk 17, No 3472)

the Apostle of Allah [said]: The earnings of a cupper are impure, the price paid for a dog is impure [ie, abominable],¹⁶ and the hire of a prostitute is impure. (Abu-Dawud, Bk 17, No 3414)

Muhammad’s reason for sparing the dogs of Medina and for permitting the ownership of dogs in certain circumstances was purely political, purely pragmatic. He begrudgingly made these concessions to avoid alienating many of his followers. But what was his reason for wanting to kill the dogs in the first place? What accounts for his antipathy? The following hadith provides an answer:

Maimuna [one of Muhammad’s wives] reported that one morning Allah’s Messenger was silent with grief. Maimuna said: Allah’s Messenger, I find a change in your mood today. Allah’s Messenger said: [The angel] Gabriel had promised me that he would meet me tonight, but he did not meet me. By Allah, he never broke his promises, and Allah’s Messenger spent the day in this sad (mood). Then it occurred to him that there had been a puppy under their cot. He commanded and it was turned out. He then took some water in his hand and sprinkled it at that place. When it was evening Gabriel met him and he said to him: You promised me that you would meet me the previous night. He said: Yes, but we do not enter a house in which there is a dog or a picture. Then on that very morning he commanded the killing of the dogs … (Muslim, Bk 24, No 5248)

[fusion_dropcap boxed="no" boxed_radius="" class="" id="" color="" hue="" saturation="" lightness="" alpha="" text_color=""]G[/fusion_dropcap]oing on this hadith, it would seem that Muhammad’s death sentence against dogs arose from his disappointment at having been cheated of a visit from an angel because of a pup hidden in his house, coupled with his eagerness to ensure open access to Muslim homes for angels in the future. Why do angels so dislike dogs? The Hadith gives no answer. Perhaps it is because dogs are unhygienic. Certainly, Muhammad touches on the matter of cleanliness in the following hadiths:

The Messenger of Allah said: The purification of the utensil belonging to any one of you, after it is licked by a dog, lies in washing it seven times, using sand for the first time. (Muslim, Bk 2, No 549)

[Muhammad] said: When the dog licks the utensil, wash it seven times, and rub it with earth the eighth time. (Muslim, Bk 2, No 551)

Muhammad seemed to appreciate that it is insanitary to have dogs in contact with food utensils, yet his proposed counter to contamination involves hocus-pocus as much as hygiene. Washing a utensil with water is sensible, but washing it seven or eight times is simply superstitious. But to return to the angels’ dislike of dogs: Perhaps the celestial beings detect a sinister quality in canines? Certainly, Muhammad maintained that some dogs are satanic:

He [the Messenger of Allah] said: The black dog is a devil. (Muslim, Bk 4, No 1032)

He (the Holy Prophet further) said: It is your duty [to kill] the jet-black (dog) having two spots (on the eyes), for it is a devil. (Muslim, Bk 10, No 3813)

Given the devilish nature of black dogs, one would expect angels to avoid them. But, according to Muhammad, angels avoid all dogs, not just black ones. Hence, dogs in general deprived their masters of the company and comfort of angels. Muhammad reiterated Gabriel’s claim, and added to it:

The Prophet said, “Angels do not enter a house which has either a dog or a picture in it.” (Bukhari, Vol 4, Bk 54, No 539)

Allah’s Messenger [said]: Angels do not accompany the travellers who have with them a dog and a bell. (Muslim, Bk 24, No 5277)

Muhammad also claimed that dogs could render a Muslim’s prayers ineffective:

the Prophet [said]: A menstruating woman and a dog cut off the prayer. (Abu-Dawud, Bk 2, No 703)

the Apostle of Allah said: When one of you prays without a sutrah, a dog, an ass, a pig, a Jew, a Magian, and a woman cut off his prayer … (Abu-Dawud, Bk 2, No 704) [NB. A “sutrah” is an object—whether permanent, such as a wall or a pillar, or temporary, such as a saddle or a spear—in front of a praying person to symbolically shield him against persons/animals who might pass in front of him.] The Messenger of Allah said: When any one of you stands for prayer and … there is not before him (a thing) equal to the back of the saddle, his prayer would be cut off by (passing of an) ass, woman, and black dog. … (Muslim, Bk 4, No 1032) Though by no means the only culprits, dogs (and perhaps especially black dogs) have the effect of preventing a Muslim’s prayers from reaching Allah, if they happen to wander in front of a supplicant who has not taken the precaution of setting up a makeshift barrier (“sutrah”). Muhammad’s youngest wife, Aisha, was indignant when she learned of his announcement about the obstructers of prayers. One hadith records:

Narrated Aisha: The things which annul the prayers were mentioned before me. They said, “Prayer is annulled by a dog, a donkey and a woman (if they pass in front of the praying people).” I said, “You have made us (i.e. women) dogs. …” (Bukhari, Vol 1, Bk 9, No 490)

The depth of Muhammad’s dislike for dogs hints at the depth of Aisha’s sense of humiliation. Another hadith (Bukhari, Vol 1, Bk 9, No 486) records Aisha as asking, “Do you make us (women) equal to dogs and donkeys?” It is, sadly, a rhetorical question. Muhammad also believed, or at least encouraged others to believe, that keeping dogs resulted in a loss of reward with Allah, thereby lessening a Muslim’s chances of entering Paradise:

Allah’s Apostle said, “If somebody keeps a dog, he loses one Qirat (of the reward) of his good deeds everyday, except if he keeps it for the purpose of agriculture or for the protection of livestock.” (Bukhari, Vol 4, Bk 54, No 541)

Allah’s Messenger [said]: He who keeps a dog other than that meant for watching the herd or for hunting loses [merit] every day out of his deeds equal to two qirat. (Muslim, Bk 10, No 3815)

It hardly matters whether the penalty for keeping a dog is one qirat or two, nor does it matter what precisely a “qirat” is, for the main meaning is plain: keeping a dog will cost the keeper part of the spiritual merit he has accumulated by doing good deeds. Given that Islam is a “works” religion, a haemorrhaging of merit is a serious matter. Muhammad maintained that Muslims will only enter Paradise if their good deeds outweigh their bad deeds. Let there be a featherweight more on the side of the bad, and all is lost. So no Muslim can afford to risk losing even one grain of merit by keeping a dog, let alone one or two grains every day! Dogs detract from good works and thereby imperil the worker’s entry to Paradise: no wonder they are considered injurious, and even iniquitous! According to the Hadith, then, the Prophet Muhammad ordered his companions to kill all dogs; and when he later revoked the order for political reasons, he gave no reprieve to black dogs, which he claimed were devils. He declared that dogs prevent angels from entering a house and from accompanying a traveller. He also asserted that dogs impede a supplicant’s prayers and reduce an owner’s spiritual merit, thereby endangering his eternal reward. It is for these reasons that Muslims to this day dislike dogs. It is for these reasons that a Muslim blind woman

The NT Coroner’s Post-Colonial Payback

Tue, 15 Jul 2025 11:59:17 +1000

[fusion_dropcap boxed="no" boxed_radius="" class="" id="" color="" hue="" saturation="" lightness="" alpha="" text_color=""]W[/fusion_dropcap]hy was there a Coroner’s inquest into the death of Kumanjayi* (Charles Arnold) Walker at Yuendumu in 2019 at the hands of Constable Zachary Rolfe, an act for which Rolfe was acquitted following a trial in the Northern Territory Supreme Court? Because it was payback. In Aboriginal lore, someone must be held responsible for a death. Judge Elisabeth Armitage, as Northern Territory Coroner, took it upon herself to have an inquest into a death the cause of which she knew. She delivered payback, Aboriginal style. The Coroner’s excuse for the inquest was the ‘unusual circumstance that a high-profile trial preceded it’ and the public interest, by which she meant the locals were angry that a white policeman had killed an Aboriginal man. Nevertheless, after two years and considerable expense, the only formal finding she made was that Walker died because of a gunshot injury to the chest and abdomen. Rolfe pulled the trigger, but who really killed Walker? That is what Armitage’s adventure was about: a chance to payback by damning the colonisation of Australia and the failure to hand power to Aboriginal elders to fix this historic wrong. Rolfe was a cowboy cop, and the Coroner understood that the exposure to daily horrific behaviour by residents of Yuendumu could desensitise police officers. Walker, however, was dangerous, and he had to be taken into custody. He threatened with an axe two police officers who had attempted to arrest him in the days before his death. One of those officers was recorded saying to Walker’s girlfriend, ‘Next time he does that … he might get shot.’ Walker was a nasty piece of work who beat the hell out of his girlfriend. Walker had an all-too-common upbringing. He struggled at school, with hearing problems, instability and violence at home. Walker’s offending was constant and only stopped when in custody or residential care. In other words, when institutionalised. His various families and community could not care for him to the extent required to stop his behaviour. He was into alcohol, petrol sniffing and cannabis. While in custody, he punched himself and hit his head on the cell walls and threatened to gouge out his own eyes. He was suspected of suffering from foetal alcohol spectrum disorder and had suicidal tendencies. The Coroner reported that when Kumanjayi was 15, he commenced a relationship with 14-year-old Rickisha Robertson. The Coroner noted that ‘Kumanjayi engaged in episodes of serious and distressing physical violence towards her.’ In the same sentence, she invoked the excuse, ‘exhibiting a familiar pattern of a child exposed to domestic family violence repeating that violence in their relationship.’ Ms Robertson is on the record, not at the Inquest, that Walker had beaten her until she cried out in pain, kicked her in the face, punched her nose, split her nose open, choked her, smashed her hand with a steel rod, dragged her by the hair and bashed her. He even attacked her while she slept. After some of these episodes, he would threaten to commit suicide if she reported the attacks to the police. These attacks took place not only behind closed doors but also in public. The ‘community’ could not solve the problem of Kumanjayi Walker. The Coroner kept reminding herself that she must not include in a finding or comment that a person is or may be guilty of an offence. Cleverly, she noted that the trial focused on the necessity for the second and third shots that Rolfe fired into Walker. There was no dispute at trial about the first shot. The Coroner was happy to investigate the first shot evidence and was at great pains to point out inconsistencies in Rolfe’s evidence at trial concerning Walker’s hand on Rolfe’s gun. She also passed judgement on Rolfe’s character and motives. She accused Rolfe of being sexist. After all, he ignored his female sergeant. She accused Rolfe of being racist because, among other things, he could not recall his ‘cultural training.’ The Coroner stated that ‘despite the focus on issues of race and racism in media reporting … It is not my function to conduct an inquiry, of any breadth or intensity, into Racism.’ But she did. She wanted to find whether Rolfe’s racism increased the likelihood of death. ‘I am not making a finding that Mr Rolfe shot Kumanjayi because he was motivated by racism.’ Of course, but it was widely and gleefully reported that racism was the evil at the heart of the matter. She played the race card. The Inquest report runs to 680 pages, and reporters seemed to cover the first-shot aspect within moments of its publication. One can only presume that the Coroner’s personnel were ready to brief the journalists so that the Yuendumu family of Walker and the community fully appreciated the payback. A strange thing to do, given that the same family and community that had abandoned Walker did not want him in the community. [fusion_dropcap boxed="no" boxed_radius="" class="" id="" color="" hue="" saturation="" lightness="" alpha="" text_color=""]W[/fusion_dropcap]hile stating that the inquest was not the opportunity for a treatise on policing in the Northern Territory or the history of black and white relations, the Coroner did both. The Inquest report exudes bias. It began with ‘I acknowledge the invaluable cultural knowledge, preserved and passed on for thousands of years, from which we all continue to learn and grow for the betterment of each generation.’ How did this ‘knowledge’ assist the Coroner in her Inquest? Did it create an apprehension of bias? Annexure B, for example, included an overview of the political economy and history of Yuendumu. Much evidence was presented by Dr Melinda Hinkson, a social anthropologist, latterly of the Institute of Postcolonial Studies in North Melbourne. The Coroner accepted Hinkson’s observation of ‘a sense of … generalised criminalisation of Aboriginal people living in remote communities,’ because of federal and Territory policies. They are right, but for the wrong reasons. Post-colonial studies indulge the fantasy that the old ways could survive in the hands of remnant communities with weakened cultural obligations and the introduction of a superior economy. The Coroner, federal, and Territory policies are captives of that fantasy. Annexure A contained an explanation of the artwork that adorned the front of the Coroner’s report. The cover image of the Findings is an image of ‘Yuendumu School Doors’, which were painted in the early 1980s by a group of Yuendumu Elders ‘who were concerned about Warlpiri children failing to engage with Western education in the local school.’ The Walpiri elders were justified in their concern about the lack of Western engagement. The Coroner might reflect on the fact that, likely, they are not engaged because their parents were paid to sit down and fed the myth that they could remain ‘on country’ and live their culture, without consequence. The consequence for Kumanjayi Walker and his behaviour is replicated a thousandfold across Australia. The Coroner makes the extraordinary statement that

...the fatal shooting of a member of the public by a police officer is traumatic for all of those involved. When the individual who dies is an Aboriginal person, there is an added layer to the anguish, given the history of Australia post-colonisation.

This suggests that the Coroner is playing to an Aboriginal audience and did not explore all possible reasons for Walker’s behaviour. Where is the proof of intergenerational trauma, and if it exists, how come it does not apply to those who attend school and get a job? The Coroner did not explore the possible explanation that intergenerational trauma, where it exists, stems from the sit-down money at the end of the missionary integration period. She chose the post-colonial trope. The Coroner accepted

that the modern coronial system, inherited from the British system of laws, cannot be perfectly integrated into the Warlpiri and Luritja traditional systems of justice.

She accepted the submission on behalf of the Walker, Lane, and Robertson families:

In this country there are two different and unreconciled systems of law and concepts of justice. The gap between the process undertaken under kardiya law – i.e., the criminal trial, the coronial investigation and this Inquest – and those comprising the yapa sense of what has happened, why it happened and what should now happen, exposes an incongruence that lies at the heart of identifying all the circumstances surrounding Kumanjayi’s death and accountability for his death.

The families wanted payback, and the Coroner delivered. There was the usual bow to the Royal Commission into Deaths in Custody. The Coroner’s job was to analyse one death, not the pattern of deaths, which in any event do not aid her cause. The Coroner must have been aware that of the 510 deaths in custody since 2020, eight were unlawful homicides, and two of these were prisoner-on-prisoner deaths. About 50 were justifiable homicides (necessary force to save others). The remainder were from natural causes. While there is a greater rate of deaths in police custody among Aborigines, this may reflect the violence of the offenders as much as the response by police. [fusion_dropcap boxed="no" boxed_radius="" class="" id="" color="" hue="" saturation="" lightness="" alpha="" text_color=""]T[/fusion_dropcap]he Northern Territory police urged the Coroner not to conduct a roving Royal Commission or search for an ‘infinite chain of causation’. The Parumpurru Committee of Yuendumu sought to have history included, and the North Australian Aboriginal Justice Agency requested that the Coroner consider ‘structural and institutional’ racism. The Coroner warned herself not to conduct a commission, but she ignored her own warning. She preferred the ‘considerable discretion’ afforded her role. Given the discretion, she should have shared the entire history and circumstances of life in Yuendumu. The Coroner asked what services were available to assist youths with behavioural issues, police training in trauma, and cultural competency. She failed to ask why the youth of Yuendumu do not understand the obligations of the dominant culture, the one that supports them. She failed to ask why the elders had painted the school doors in the 1980s, in the hope that their children would gain a Western education, but that has not taken place. And there is her troubling acceptance of Aboriginal lore, for example, that Aboriginal officers would ‘teach us their laws and we would teach them ours’. This is a failure to apply the law. The Coroner observed that the community of Yuendumu continued to experience break-ins, low school attendance, anger towards local police, and, in 2022, the defunding of the primary Youth Service following years of instability and governance problems. She blamed the Howard government's Intervention for weakening the authority of the Elders, but leaves out the fact that the Elders were the suspects in many cases of abuse and were feared by victims in these remote and closed societies. The Coroner, in her mini Royal Commission, bewailed the fact that no doctors or psychologists were based in Yuendumu. Who would want to live there? No Aboriginal medical graduate apparently. It is not safe to live there. Many Territory health services have security guards to protect their staff. The local clinic was abandoned for a while following Walker’s death, and the nurses were in fear for their lives. Instead, the Coroner recommended the usual agenda of Anti-Racism Strategy, Unconscious Bias Training, Community Resilience and Engagement, and Cultural Awareness Training -- all capitalised to emphasise their importance, if not impotence. The Coroner recommended expanding the Yuendumu night patrol and implementing ‘sustainable youth services with good governance’. She wanted the Northern Territory Government to train and pay ‘culturally skilled mediators’, to provide for Aboriginal-led, on-country programs, rehabilitation and diversion services for young people. Best of all, she wanted the government to establish ‘a single, elected, remunerated, leadership group in Yuendumu’ as a means of providing community control over the delivery of services. This group could design a ‘10-year plan for youth and young adults in Yuendumu’, including a mapping report for the resourcing required to achieve goals for ‘reducing criminogenic factors affecting young people’. Jobs for their parents might have helped, but that is too late. There are jobs in Yuendumu, but there are no applicants. The attitude, now deeply ingrained, is that the white man keeps the black man. For example, there are around 160 Non-Government Organisations in and around Alice Springs, the nearest settlement to Yuendumu. Aboriginal communities are awash with help. [fusion_dropcap boxed="no" boxed_radius="" class="" id="" color="" hue="" saturation="" lightness="" alpha="" text_color=""]T[/fusion_dropcap]he Coroner recommended that Aboriginal community-controlled health organisations develop ‘culturally competent and sustainable mental health services’ in Central Australia. But she received no evidence that community-controlled organisations are any good. Of course, she also recommended ‘pathways for Aboriginal employees to be trained and adequately remunerated as mental health specialists.’ But so many can barely read and write. The local school enrolments are declining. There is no record of attendance available, and no NAPLAN published results. No evidence of graduates. A recent review highlighted the ‘challenges’ of promoting multilingualism and ‘non-dominant’ cultural knowledge, describing it as ‘an ongoing endeavour.’ In other words, it does not work. And they have been at it for decades. The Yuendumu community were angry and frustrated with Walker because of his break-ins. They did not want him in the community. And yet, so much of the response is slated as a community response. The Coroner bewails the fact that the local organisation failed to provide governance. How could they? They were at war with each other. Community governance requires reasonable people and shared interests. These do not exist in Yuendumu. Warren Williams, who is a grandfather of Walker, remembered a happy childhood in Yuendumu during the Mission era, including the children wanting to go to school. This reflection is common. In 1976, at the end of the mission period, Nugget Coombs and W E H Stanner visited Yuendumu. Their grand plan, among cottage-industry activity, was the ‘Aboriginalisation of services’. Policymakers should have listened to wiser heads. In The Coroner’s Annexure B is this gem.

In 1981, social geographer Elspeth Young observed that ‘the town [of Yuendumu] has virtually no economic rationale … It remains dependent on the rest of Australia for almost every cent its community spends, and every article consumed.

This ‘evidence’ was ignored. Instead, the Coroner supported the evidence of the ‘profound disempowerment’ of Warlpiri Elders caused by government policies since 1996 (a big hint at the election of the Howard government), which ‘undermined the authority of Elders.’ ‘Warlpiri people are given the sense that it is no longer viable …[or] legal, for them to be able to administer their customary law.’ As if this would have saved Walker. Another hidden gem in Annexure B:

Several senior and middle-aged leaders have left Yuendumu to settle elsewhere, citing despair and frustration around the diminishment of Warlpiri community control and capacity to resolve disputes.

Community development is the last refuge of scoundrels. Yuendumu is not something to develop, but some people do need saving, probably by leaving. Rolfe responded to the findings with the acute observation that ‘The coroner’s infantilisation of Indigenous communities does not empower but rather diminishes agency and reinforces dependency.’ He is right. The post-colonial critique, which the Coroner used as a payback for Walker’s people, will kill the next Walker until policymakers find a new part of Australian society to mess with. * The name is assigned to a dead person for a time. Gary Johns is the principal of Close the Gap Research

The post The NT Coroner’s Post-Colonial Payback first appeared on Quadrant.

Of Woke Frogs and Socialist Mice

Tue, 15 Jul 2025 05:05:00 +1000

Left Is Not Woke by Susan Neiman Polity, 2023, 189pp

[fusion_dropcap boxed="no" boxed_radius="" class="" id="" color="" hue="" saturation="" lightness="" alpha="" text_color=""]F[/fusion_dropcap]rom the outset -- the very first page to be precise -- Susan Neiman states she is happy “to be called leftist and socialist”, but never a “liberal”. Liberals do not extend their canopy to include social rights (education, housing etc) as well as political rights; socialists do (p 147). More to the point, it is plain she does not consider herself ‘woke’. Although being woke is commonly understood being on the left or left-wing, the author, who is the director of the Einstein Forum in Potsdam, argues this is a dangerous blurring of separate things. As for what is ‘woke’, Neiman does not have a particularly tight definition, writing (pp 6-7);

[Woke] begins with concern for marginalized persons, and ends by reducing each to the prism of her marginalization. The idea of intersectionality might have emphasized the ways in which all of us have more than one identity. Instead, it led to focus on those parts of identities that are most marginalized, and multiplied them into a forest of trauma. Woke emphasizes the ways in which particular groups have been denied justice, and seeks to rectify and repair the damage.

So how does this differ from left ideals? For Neiman, the core of the left-wing position is “a commitment to universalism over tribalism; a firm distinction between justice and power, and a belief in the possibility of progress” (p 2). This trio of core principles -- universalism, justice and progress --distinguishes the Left from the woke. Although the woke movement is born from traditional left-wing emotions, it takes, Neiman maintains, a form quite different to left ideology. First, the woke are not universalist, but tribalist. Socialism is international or global; it was and is always oriented toward international solidarity. Neiman finds that absent in wokeism. There is too much focus upon racial or indigenous or sexual identities. Identity politics -- a key plank of woke -- is the politics of interest groups, and these are seldom, if ever, transnational. Interest groups are sort of tribes, if not, when you get even more finely-grained nuances, “triblets” (p 11). There is, she insists, too much stress upon victimhood. The obsession with culture and post-colonialism is too particular and not universalist. Neiman also detects a contempt for reason in woke thinkers. For the author, the left grew out of the Enlightenment, a movement she stoutly defends, and the primacy of reason is something socialists do not spurn. Second, the woke movement is preoccupied with power to the neglect of justice. The woke’s patron saint is Michel Foucault. Power relations in the real world are deeply embedded and operate systemically, albeit largely covertly. The calls for justice are but a sham and a rhetorical device by the powerful to mask power grabs by them. In what seems to me to be a digression, Neiman sees woke thinking undergirded by evolutionary psychology; power struggles are sociobiological expressions of selfish genes. But the left has not given up on justice, or at least social justice. Third, the left is open to the possibility of progress. By contrast, the woke protagonists have imbibed too much of Foucault, who was notoriously dismissive of ideas of improvement or progress. The author cannot discern many, if any strains, of hope echoing in the corridors of the woke. Again, Neiman defends the Enlightenment. Progress and reform is possible, as the left can, on a good day, attest to (remember the US Civil Rights movement), and progress is not to be caricatured as some utopian end-point. There is a lot to like about her short book and she writes very clearly. There’s a good turn of phrase sprinkled in her essay. Thus:

[C]an we allow the experience of powerlessness to be elevated to an inevitable source of political authority? I’d prefer we return to a model in which your claims to authority are focused on what you’ve done to the world, not what the world did to you. (p 25)

[C]laiming a more miserable birth than your true one guarantees new forms of status ... What was recently a stigma has become a source of standing. Where painful origins and persecution were once acknowledged … the pain was a prelude to overcoming it. Prevailing over victimhood … could be a source of pride; victimhood itself was not.” (p 22)

Neiman strives to make it a readable publication for the general audience. This is commendable, but I do not see why having added citations for many quoted passages she simply omits citations on other occasions. Since she wrote this (an “expanded and updated edition”) we have seen the emergence of the so-called “Woke Right” (a term that appears to describe conservatives who borrow the woke playbook of victimhood and marginalization.) I wonder if the author would agree to that characterization as more accurate? Overall, I am not convinced by her argument, which she simplifies a bit too much and I dare say woke theorists would reply that the movement is concerned with global trends, justice and does not rule out progress. Far be it for me to make the case for the woke though. I still prefer the term “political correctness” not woke. The former is firmly rooted in Soviet ideology and I consider it more accurately points to the cultural Marxist tenets of the current antagonists to The West. Be that as it may, to be politically correct is now to be woke. For me, the woke are the adolescent vanguard of the modern left; to be woke is to be left, or so close to the left as make any real distinction trifling. Rex Ahdar is an Emeritus Professor of Law at the University of Otago

The post Of Woke Frogs and Socialist Mice first appeared on Quadrant.

The Girl in The Third Man

Tue, 15 Jul 2025 00:49:59 +1000

[fusion_dropcap boxed="no" boxed_radius="" class="" id="" color="" hue="" saturation="" lightness="" alpha="" text_color=""]W[/fusion_dropcap]hen the British film crew arrived in Vienna, they found the streets had been cleared of debris. The ambience they had envisaged for their feature film, The Third Man, was compromised. A disbelieving Graham Greene, the script’s author and a well-known novelist, disappeared off to a seedy club to get plastered. Seven months earlier, at the end of winter, Vienna had been devastated when the writer visited to scout his screenplay. There was rubble and broken masonry everywhere, with blasted buildings collapsed into streets and the main thoroughfares littered with the scorched shells of military vehicles. Greene had crafted a story that relied on the character of this ruined, broken city, as when he likened the shattered Prater fairground to bones jutting through snow.[1]

From our June 2017 issue. Click here to subscribe

Vienna was much the same when the author returned with the film’s director Carol Reed in early June. Over a fortnight the pair had physically paced out scenes around the city, firming up the storyline and establishing continuity. When finished they had a strong draft script, complete with the locations where scenes would be filmed. But the civic authorities had thrown themselves into busy activity over the summer months. So when the cast and crew arrived in the city in late October the international zone within the Ringstrasse was tidy, if still wartorn, and the Western occupation authorities had swept away the worst of the chaos in their respective sectors. Not a burnt-out tank was to be seen. After looking around, the director and cameramen wondered if they could shoot more outdoors in the Soviet sectors, which were still an undisguised mess.[2] Russian soldiers had other ideas. The film unit would set up, then burly men in uniforms would appear, bellowing “Nyet! Nyet!” Ruins were not to be photographed, for no one was to show the Soviet sector in an unfavourable light. The unflappable Carol Reed would flourish official paperwork giving permission to film, but the Russians (even if they could read) had other ideas and tried to halt work. It then usually turned into a shoving match, with the belligerent soldiers grabbing at equipment. At the initial encounter the Russians did actually yank the cinecamera away from its operator after a first take. The next time, at the railway station, Reed and his indignant crew wrestled with the soldiers, refusing to surrender their gear. There was a confrontation again when they were shooting at the Prater, a ruined amusement park where the main character, Holly Martins, was to face Harry Lime. Even when the outdoor unit filmed an innocuous scene where four conspirators meet on the Deutschbrücke—the only undamaged bridge across the Danube—Soviet soldiers still harried the crew to finish and move on. It was urgent that shooting be completed quickly. And not just because the film crew was working to a tight three-week schedule. The political climate in Austria was unpredictable and edgy in October 1948. The Berlin Airlift was under way and many Viennese feared their city was likewise about to be isolated by Soviet forces. Given the tense state of the Cold War, Reed wanted to wrap up the location work speedily and fly back to London before something erupted. Which was probably why he organised shooting into three units—each filming at a different time of day—directing them around the clock, while living on Benzedrine and snatching a couple of hours exhausted sleep whenever he could.[3] The film aimed to transplant the urban nightmare thriller of Hollywood’s film noir to a war-ravaged European capital. Its plot centred on Holly Martins (Joseph Cotten), a happy-go-lucky writer of cowboy stories, who has arrived in Allied-occupied post-war Vienna—a traumatised city overwhelmed by criminal corruption. This American innocent is shaken to find that his boyhood chum Harry Lime (Orson Welles) has just met with a fatal accident, and, worse still, is suspected by the military powers of running a racket in adulterated penicillin. Martins gets mixed up with Harry’s Czech girlfriend Anna Schmidt (Alida Valli), and a sequence of shady eccentrics, in search of the unidentified “third man” said to have witnessed Lime’s death. Of course, as readers familiar with this cinema classic will know, Lime turns out to have faked his own demise to escape Major Calloway (Trevor Howard) who is cracking down on the lethal black market in medicine. [fusion_dropcap boxed="no" boxed_radius="" class="" id="" color="" hue="" saturation="" lightness="" alpha="" text_color=""]T[/fusion_dropcap]his project was prompted by the British producer Alexander Korda’s urge to access film profits effectively locked on the Continent due to post-war financial restrictions. If his company’s box office takings could not be remitted back to London without incurring prohibitive duties, it was possible to spend them on the Continent to fund film production there. So Korda devised a scheme to use this money on hiring facilities and talent at a foreign location, even where possible remunerating some of the British crew in European currency. This is how the screenplay’s author Graham Greene came to purchase his famed villa at Capri after shooting was completed—Korda covertly paid him the equivalent £5000 offshore, not in Britain. Indeed, when final studio shooting in London was held up for several weeks, Korda parked the leading actors at a lavish hotel in Paris. It made best financial sense. Korda had commissioned Greene to write a thriller set in either Vienna or Rome. Both cities had extensive studio facilities and equipment available for lease, as well as film production crew and quality actors desperate for work. An expenses-paid trip for the author to prepare his story was sorted out by Korda’s company, and Greene flew off. He spent three weeks in bitterly cold Vienna, followed by a few tense days stuck in Prague (he arrived as the Communists overthrew the Czech government), before proceeding to Rome. After a week in the Italian capital, he continued southward to the Bay of Naples where he enjoyed warmer weather while speedily drafting a novella-cum-storyline. He began writing on March 2, 1948, and completed his treatment on April 24. Greene liberally adapted material from real life when crafting his initial manuscript. In Vienna’s exclusive Sacher Hotel he had run into the novelist Elizabeth Bowen, who was making a lecture tour for the British Council.[4] They dined together, talking shop and swapping gossip. Bowen’s experiences with Europeans keen to learn about modern literature were hilariously transmuted into Holly Martins’s inept lecture to bewildered Viennese intellectuals. And Greene had a fruitful encounter with Peter Smolka, local correspondent for the Times, who, among other information on local crime, alerted the author to the contraband market in penicillin and a mounting death toll from contaminated medications.[5] Smolka also explained Vienna’s convoluted policing arrangements caused by mistrust between the four occupying powers. The writer added to his mix colourful snippets previously gathered when he worked for British intelligence. Greene’s wartime service with the SIS has served critics with a ripe opportunity for speculation and embellishment. The plain truth is that he largely handled paperwork. “Most of his work was routine,” his biographer Michael Shelden explains. “He kept his files in order, sent coded instructions to Lisbon, and discussed strategy with his chief.”[6] So if Greene was promoted to head the Portuguese desk in 1943, he found the work monotonous, and always wanted to get back to serious writing. Nevertheless, the SIS did provide some entertaining material he later put to literary use. The 1958 novel Our Man in Havana, for example, was based on a resourceful anti-Nazi in Lisbon who, entirely on his own initiative, invented a fictitious spy network to sell false information to the gullible Germans.[7] For The Third Man, Greene (right) plainly drew from a stock of tales confided by Kim Philby, the head of Section V. The two had struck up an affable camaraderie when Greene joined the SIS, lunching together often, nipping off to a club after work, founding what would be a lifelong friendship (they still corresponded after Philby defected).[8] Some of Philby’s yarns involved the 1934 February Uprising when, as Viennese fascists shelled workers’ housing estates, he used the sewer system to help fugitives flee the searching Heimwehr.[9] The film’s plot not only hinged on this same element: Michael Shelden wonders if in shaping Harry Lime, a charming and duplicitous crook, Greene used aspects of Philby’s life and personality.[10] Certainly the character Anna Schmidt was inspired by Litzi Friedman, a young Jewish socialist Philby had married in Austria to place under the protection of his British passport.[11] [fusion_dropcap boxed="no" boxed_radius="" class="" id="" color="" hue="" saturation="" lightness="" alpha="" text_color=""]T[/fusion_dropcap]he creative strengths of The Third Man were due more to accident than planning.[12] Carol Reed was wrestling with unexpected pressures throughout. From the moment the project was approved, both Alex Korda and David Selznick were looking over the director’s shoulder and giving (sometimes contradictory) orders.[13] They wanted a movie which would appeal to audiences not just in Britain and its dominions. They had their sights on the lucrative American market. This was why, when finished, The Third Man resembled a Hollywood-style thriller. It also accounts for the producers’ casting the actors Joseph Cotten and Orson Welles for the roles of Martins and Lime. These were distinctly British characters in Graham Greene’s treatment, but American stars were mandatory for hearty US attendances.[14] Problems did not ease once Reed and his crew were on location. Besides Soviet obstructiveness, there were countless practical difficulties to filming in Vienna. Reed and his cinematographer Robert Krasker (who had recently shot both Brief Encounter and Odd Man Out) had conceived of the film as stylistically recalling Bill Brandt’s brooding photographs of nocturnal London during the Blitz. But many scenes could not be filmed as they envisaged. So cinematic details now praised by scholars were often due to decisions made on the run. Still, shooting was unexpectedly eased by Austrians hired to support the British crew, especially a local cameraman assigned to the third unit, Hans Schneeberger. He was not listed in the final credits, although Schneeberger had been respected in the Austrian movie industry since the 1920s, having even worked with Arnold Fanck and Leni Riefenstahl. His cinematic fingerprints are all over The Third Man. This is instantly evident when we look closely at Reed and Krasker’s earlier big project Odd Man Out of 1947. If lighting is shadowy and dramatic, the cinematography is wooden in what is very much a studio production. Scenes often resemble a play in a small theatre, with the camera shifting between a view from an imagined dress circle, to conventional close-ups of the lead actors. Many shots are neatly squared, with tilts, perspectives and Dutch angles never seen. In comparison The Third Man is not only more technically informed and adventurous, it also employs camerawork typical of Schneeberger’s 1940s productions for Wien-Film. The British unit to which this veteran cinematographer was assigned found he worked quickly. Using an old-fashioned Éclair camera, Schneeberger had flair, and composed shots in ways unimagined by the newcomers.[15] He designed the constructivist-style shot looking down from high up where the four conspirators meet on the Deutschbrücke. An impressed Carol Reed increased the Austrian’s responsibilities, and other cameramen were soon seeking Schneeberger’s advice. The British crews learned quickly, as evident in how an assistant cameraman, Guy Hamilton, who was to get facial close-ups of people on streets at night, embraced throughout Dutch angles (canted shots), a stylistic feature of Central European films. This raised eyebrows across Hollywood: the director William Wyler mailed Reed a spirit level along with the mocking note, “Carol, next time you make a picture, just put it on top of the camera.”[16]

Joseph Cotton, Orson Welles, and Carol Reed shooting the Prater Wheel sequence in The Third Man

Actually, The Third Man begins and finishes with Schneeberger’s adept camerawork. He selected and filmed all of the opening montage, including the striking image of a corpse floating in the icy Danube—his own idea. Likewise, the movie’s closing shot where Alida Valli walks towards the camera along a tree-lined avenue in Vienna’s cemetery was Schneeberger’s design.[17] He even flaunted his skill by having Valli begin her walk three times further back from where Carol Reed suggested. No other cameraman could hold the focus. When shooting finished that day, the crew gave Schneeberger a spontaneous ovation. Eighteen months later Alex Korda’s in-house cinematographer Robert Krasker may have been awarded an Oscar for The Third Man, but it was due in no small part to Hans Schneeberger’s (left) uncredited work. The performance of Orson Welles as the elusive Harry Lime was equally decisive to the movie’s achievement. Where this amoral charmer came from—Lime is unlike any figure in Greene’s prior fiction—and how it was crafted into The Third Man, is untouched by critical discussion. In his younger days Graham Greene had ambitions to write quite commercial books, so before the Second World War he tried his hand at several popular genres. Stamboul Train of 1932, his first money spinner, was an adventure story pastiching contemporary thrillers, while Brighton Rock—the 1938 novel that brought him critical acclaim—adheres to a 1930s vogue for gritty British crime stories. This low-life genre is now forgotten, even if titles like The Gilt Kid, a best-selling 1936 yarn by James Curtis about a cockney burglar, remain an entertaining read. Most influential at the time was Robert Westerby’s bleak violent tale Wide Boys Never Work. Released in 1937, this sordid story was a publishing sensation and sparked calls for censorship. Besides appealing to a popular readership, Wide Boys Never Work hooked some discriminating book-lovers—John Lehmann and Leonard Woolf were admirers—who praised it as a potent Hogarthian view from beneath. When in 1942 the print industry was hit by wartime restrictions and book-runs were heavily cut, Methuen was permitted a large second edition. Later still, Lehmann himself brought out an up-market collector’s edition in early 1948. [fusion_dropcap boxed="no" boxed_radius="" class="" id="" color="" hue="" saturation="" lightness="" alpha="" text_color=""]W[/fusion_dropcap]ritten with grim flair, Westerby’s novel portrayed the violent world of “wide boys” (from wide-awake or quick-witted, the pre-war slang for a “spiv”) who lived by theft, extortion, confidence tricks, gambling rackets and prostitution. The central character is a would-be tough from the Midlands who, fired from his factory job for horsing around, decides to make good in the foggy capital. He buys a train ticket, travels south, then hooks up with a prior criminal contact who gives him work as a muscled minder in the underworld of Soho and the West End during the Depression. Much is depicted in terse vivid prose: a dodgy used-car business in Fitzrovia; gambling dives in Soho; the White City greyhound track; seedy rooming houses in Marylebone; a Bayswater boxing gym; a covert gay club off Regent Street; gangsters, con men, prostitutes; razor fights between gangs; communists spruiking in Hyde Park; Mosley’s thugs spoiling for a punch-up. Wide Boys Never Work, which exuded authentic literary strengths, was a manifest influence on Graham Greene’s Brighton Rock. Greene visibly dances with this source in several chapters, putting his own stamp on an evolving new genre by exploring the characters’ psychology and introducing a religious element. Brighton Rock became his watershed work. He never dipped back into popular fiction. So it comes as a surprise to find an obvious version of Westerby’s memorable shyster Graham Swing—called Harry Lime—figuring in the treatment for The Third Man. This archetypal con man of Wide Boys Never Work had come equipped with a colourful biography. Forced to leave an inconsequential public school, Swing had been “given up as a disgraceful disappointment by a family steeped in the best traditions of the Civil Service”.[18] We learn that already in adolescence he was manipulating others, especially an unidentified younger boy at school. Graham Swing had soon found his metier as a salesman in dubious goods, being blessed with “an eye for a snip and a mug to take it that amounted almost to genius”.[19] He views these customers with disparaging contempt. Besides his affable patter—we are told the Old School Tie and drawling voice are essential to his act[20]—Swing uses a seeming middle-class respectability to attract victims while breezing by the police, for he “looked like what passes in a good many places for a gentleman—which he wasn’t”.[21] Mixing with hardened gangsters, he has ambitions to shift to serious crime. There is little mistaking Graham Swing as a source for Harry Lime in Greene’s original storyline. Possibly, given that John Lehmann’s reissue of Wide Boys Never Work had just appeared, Greene had re-read the novel and seen a useful figure he could develop (Westerby was himself now a Hollywood scriptwriter). But in shooting on location, Carol Reed and Orson Welles, the film’s director and the actor cast as Lime, would reinvent what had been an obvious London spiv. Their first decision involved costume. Harry Lime was not dressed in the “wide” attire affected by London’s smarter criminal fraternity. No bespoke grey suit, dark blue tailored shirt, flamboyant silk tie, or spiv’s dapper trilby. Instead, Welles was fitted with a long, thick black coat which buttoned nearly to the neck, as well as a black scarf and broad-brimmed black fedora. Seen amid the ruins of Vienna, this attire reeked of comfort and expense without linking Lime to a distinct criminal class. He was, literally, an indistinguishable dark figure. The second decision concerned Lime’s dialogue in the ferris wheel above the Prater. Welles does not exude the bitter contempt towards average people of Westerby’s con man. There is no hatred, no malice in him. Instead, the American gives his character a bemused arrogance: as conveyed in his comments about the people in the ruined park beneath. Harry Lime sees himself as looking down on everyday people from on high. Welles’s version of an amoral criminal treats life as an entertaining game in which, savouring the spoils of corruption, he steers others around like clueless pieces on a board. [fusion_dropcap boxed="no" boxed_radius="" class="" id="" color="" hue="" saturation="" lightness="" alpha="" text_color=""]I[/fusion_dropcap]n so doing Welles endows upon Lime his own giant-sized ego. The actor was determined never to be eclipsed in any film, and in the fleeting appearance of his character in The Third Man he went all out to establish a grand presence.[22] This was why, as in Citizen Kane, he barges in on Joseph Cotten’s lines.[23] Carol Reed allowed him to tailor his own lines until they felt comfortable, and while Welles stuck closely to the script, he did add remarks for Lime’s leave-taking of Holly Martins:

In Italy for the Thirty Years War under the Borgias they had warfare, terror, murder, bloodshed—but they produced Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci and the Renaissance. In Switzerland they had brotherly love, they had five hundred years of democracy and peace, and what did that produce? The cuckoo clock! So long Ho

Universal Basic Idiot! – ConspiracyOz

Mon, 14 Jul 2025 21:11:39 +1000

The Universal Basic Idiot is not here just yet eh Kacy – Mick Raven

‘I didn’t quite get that’ – Kacy

Universal basic income – Wikipedia

Universal basic income (UBI) is a social welfare proposal in which all citizens of a given population

regularly receive a minimum income in the form of an unconditional transfer payment, i.e.,

without a means test or need to perform work. In contrast, a guaranteed minimum incomeis paid

only to those who do not already receive an income that is enough to live on.

A UBI would be received independently of any other income.If the level is sufficient to meet a person’s basic needs

(i.e., at or above the poverty line),it is considered a full basic income; if it is less than that amount,it is called a partial basic income.

As of 2025, no country has implemented a full UBI system, but two countries—Mongolia and Iran—

have had a partial UBI in the past.There have been numerous pilot projects,

and the idea is discussed in many countries.Some have labelled UBI as utopian due to its historical origin

Elon Musk Says Universal Income Is Inevitable    March 27, 2025

Universal basic income (UBI) provides regular payments to all individuals in a community,

regardless of their employment status or financial need. The idea is that when everyone has enough money

to satisfy their basic needs, the overall well-being of society at large is enhanced.

Elon Musk_ AI will push us towards universal high income 2024

Elon Musk says Universal Basic Income is “going to be necessary ”

ubi – (AI) Google Search

AI Overview

UBI, or Universal Basic Income, is a social welfare policy that proposes regular,

unconditional cash payments to all citizens, regardless of their income, employment status,

or other factors. It’s a form of social security that aims to provide a basic standard of living for everyone.

The idea has been gaining traction as a potential solution to various economic and social challenges,

including income inequality, job displacement due to automation, and the rising cost of living.

‘Micro-Retirement’_ The New Career Trend Rising Among Gen Z     Jan 29, 2025

Gen Z workers are paving the way for the next generation of workers by continuing to prioritize a healthy work-life balance.

They were set to outnumber Baby Boomers in the American workforce for the first time last year,

shifting workplace dynamics and transforming the today’s workplace culture.

It has been estimated that 13% of retirees plan to re-enter the job market in 2025 in droves.

As the movement—known as “The Great Retiree Return”— rises,more younger employees are entering into “micro-retirement.”

But what do these age reversal trends mean? What is a “micro-retirement,”

and what can employers do to accommodate to these opposing trends?

Poverty is a System Problem Driving Anger – a UBI is the System Solution    May 18, 2024

This article offers a way to bring the temperature down in an increasingly fearful and angry world:

through the phased introduction of a Universal Basic Income (UBI).

Using a unique funding method that requires no increases in taxes or debt,

and without disadvantaging anyone already reliant on government support.

Basic Income Australia

The official YouTube channel of Basic Income Australia

Basic Income Australia Limited.pdf

Basic Income Australia thanks the Select Committee on Adopting Artificial Intelligence

for the opportunity to make a submission about how AI should be adopted in Australia,

and in particular its implications under terms of reference:

risks and harms arising from the adoption of AI technologies, including bias,discrimination, and error;

and potential threats to democracy and trust in institutions from generative AI;

BASIC INCOME AUSTRALIA LIMITED _ ACNC

Charity details

ABN:68664402582

Address:

6 Nepean Hwy
Brighton
VIC, 3186, Australia

Email:m.haines@vanzi.com.au

Address For Service email:directors@basicincomeaustralia.com

Website:basicincomeaustralia.com

Phone:0418121561

VANZI brokering the Governance Framework for the 3D Geo-referenced Digital Built & Legal Environment

UBI advocate Michael Haines on… – Economics Explored – Apple Podcasts   Apr 29, 2022

Michael Haines is the CEO of VANZI, the Virtual Australia and New Zealand Initiative.

Michael has 40+ years of experience in a wide variety of senior management and consulting roles across a range of industries: government,

telecommunications, brewing, construction, consumer goods, car manufacturing and transport and logistics covering a wide range of disciplines.

While he has previously sat on the Board of the Australian Logistics Council

and remains a member of Austroads Intelligent Transport Industry Reference Group,

he was instrumental in establishing VANZI and his entire time is now devoted to the VANZ project.

Visions of the Future Part 4    Mar 03 2025

The business you work for is in strife and they are cutting back hours. It’s tough for the owner,

but what they offer is just not enough to survive on its own. Fortunately,

the UBI has just been implemented and you know that it will keep coming in to cover the basics

– no need to apply, no need to justify entitlement, no delay. Even more importantly,

it has let you keep working so that instead of the cut back in hours being a disaster,

it now means that whatever you earn is a boon on top of you UBI. The more you work, the better off you’ll be.

Sometimes you really do think you are dreaming. For your whole life it’s been a constant struggle,

in an out of work, and never sure when you’ll be cast into despair next. It’s been good for your boss too,

as he’s been able to keep you on. Much better to have a happy employee than someone who’s struggling to survive,

or a new employee that has to be trained up.

Reflections on the Impact of COVID19 Nov 13 2023

The implementation of UBI holds the promise of significantly reducing financial stress,

a factor often linked to domestic violence and family breakdown, fostering a more cohesive society by minimizing fear, hate, and anger.

The positive impact of such an approach isn’t just conjecture; it’s backed by the real-world experiences from the pandemic

and from various UBI pilot programs conducted globally over the last five decades.

Haines aims to bring universal basic income to Australia   Oct 20, 2023

The Devouring State

Mon, 14 Jul 2025 12:04:24 +1000
[fusion_dropcap boxed="no" boxed_radius="" class="" id="" color="" hue="" saturation="" lightness="" alpha="" text_color=""]T[/fusion_dropcap]here is a quiet but powerful assumption that underlies much of the modern political left: that people are fixed. You are who you are—because of your upbringing, your environment, your skin colour, your class, your chromosomes—and you are stuck that way. This is not a fringe belief. It is foundational. It determines how the left writes policy, how it talks about people, and ultimately how it justifies its own existence. This deterministic worldview—where the future is something done to us, not something we build—is no minor quirk. It is the lifeblood of leftist politics. Without it, the left’s policies begin to unravel, its rhetoric loses force, and its claims to moral authority collapse. For if people are truly free—if they possess the capacity for self-betterment, resilience, and growth—then the left’s vast machinery of redistribution, intervention, and protection becomes unnecessary, or worse, infantilising. To understand this dynamic, the work of Carl Jung provides a useful framework. His archetype of the devouring mother—the figure who smothers her children with care, robbing them of the challenges that build independence—is an apt metaphor for the modern welfare state. The devouring mother does not act out of cruelty but out of a pathological need to protect, to provide, and to be needed. She denies the child the trials that would make him strong—because his weakness justifies her role. This is exactly how many modern governments behave: offering more and more, doing more and more, until the individual no longer knows how to stand. In psychological and behavioural literature, the case for agency is overwhelming. The belief that one’s actions matter—that personal responsibility and effort shape outcomes—is one of the most robust predictors of success across nearly every domain of life. Children raised to believe in their capacity to overcome hardship fare better academically, emotionally, and economically. Adults who take responsibility for their choices are healthier and more resilient. Communities that foster self-reliance tend to be safer, more cohesive, and more innovative. [fusion_dropcap boxed="no" boxed_radius="" class="" id="" color="" hue="" saturation="" lightness="" alpha="" text_color=""]B[/fusion_dropcap]ut here lies the problem: individuals who believe they can lift themselves up don’t need bureaucrats to do it for them. Citizens who believe in their capacity to act don’t require constant intervention, assistance, or redistribution. And so, from the left’s perspective, this belief in human potential is not just inconvenient—it is dangerous. It threatens the very foundation of their legitimacy. It is no accident that the Left tends to frame people as helpless victims, be it of capitalism, colonialism, patriarchal oppression, or genetics. These narratives are not just analytical tools; they are political necessities. They serve to delegitimise personal agency while legitimising the expansive role of the state. If individuals are seen as powerless it becomes the state’s sacred duty to rescue them. And just like the devouring mother, the State can feel morally righteous for doing so. This dynamic sets up a feedback loop. The more the government provides, the more dependent the citizen becomes. The more dependent the citizen, the more justified the government feels in expanding its role. With every new program, every new entitlement, the citizen is left with fewer opportunities to struggle, fewer chances to grow, and fewer reasons to believe in his or her own strength. The government, meanwhile, grows more indispensable. Over time, this creates a population that is not merely dependent but fragile. And fragility is the enemy of freedom. For freedom is not the absence of constraints—it is the earned right to direct one’s life, and that right is predicated on the assumption of responsibility. A person who cannot take responsibility for their choices, their livelihood, or their future, has no business claiming freedom. Freedom without responsibility is not liberty—it is license, chaos, or worse, collapse. This is the forgotten equation at the heart of political freedom.
freedom = responsibility.
The more responsibility we forfeit to the State, the less freedom we can reasonably demand. And when the State provides everything—education, healthcare, housing, income, identity—it inevitably feels entitled to control everything. What we say. How we raise our children. What we consume. How we move. What we believe. A State that feeds and clothes and medicates its citizens from cradle to grave will soon come to see them not as citizens, but as dependents. And dependents do not govern themselves. [fusion_dropcap boxed="no" boxed_radius="" class="" id="" color="" hue="" saturation="" lightness="" alpha="" text_color=""]T[/fusion_dropcap]his creeping paternalism is often accepted under the guise of compassion. But it is compassion corrupted—stripped of its connection to truth and agency. Compassion, properly understood, does not mean removing hardship from life. It means walking alongside others as they face it. The left, however, increasingly uses compassion as a rhetorical weapon to justify control. And in doing so, it obscures a crucial truth: that strength comes only through struggle, that dignity is born from difficulty, and that the sacredness of human life lies in its potential—not just its present condition. This erosion of belief in potential has consequences far beyond economics or welfare policy. Take the abortion debate. At its core is a question of potential: Is the child in the womb a life in progress, or merely a clump of cells? To justify abortion up to—and even beyond—the ninth month, the left must deny the potential of that unborn human. For once you acknowledge potential, you must also acknowledge personhood. And personhood, once granted, demands protection. This rejection of potential—the refusal to see what could be—is the philosophical root of much of what ails modern politics. It explains why freedom is fading, why responsibility is despised, why the state grows ever larger, and why so many individuals feel lost, small, and voiceless. To reverse this, we must recover our belief in the sacredness of the individual soul—not as a finished product, but as a becoming, a story in motion. Politics, like parenting, must mature. The proper role of government is not to treat citizens like infants, but to help them grow into adults. That means letting go, stepping back, and trusting people to live with the consequences of their freedom. It means acknowledging that life is unfair, but that resilience is possible. It means affirming that every human being—regardless of origin—carries within them a divine spark of potential. If we do not recover this truth, then the devouring state will grow unchecked. And like the devouring mother, it will insist it only wants what’s best for us—even as it consumes our dignity, our agency, and our freedom.
The post The Devouring State first appeared on Quadrant.

Discussion: Maps, Myths and Monoliths

Mon, 14 Jul 2025 07:11:00 +1000
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The Unfinished Englishness of Modernity

Mon, 14 Jul 2025 04:41:05 +1000

When the Times cast doubt on the importance of the British moment in history the temptation to respond proved irresistible
The post The Unfinished Englishness of Modernity first appeared on Quadrant.

Jesus: A Classical Perspective

Mon, 14 Jul 2025 00:33:17 +1000
[fusion_dropcap boxed="no" boxed_radius="" class="" id="" color="" hue="" saturation="" lightness="" alpha="" text_color=""]T[/fusion_dropcap]he presentation of Jesus of Nazareth in the four Gospels of the New Testament is highly selective in terms of what is left out (most of his life), and in terms of the focus for what is included (almost exclusively his ministry). Moreover the presentation is culturally selective and distorting for the mental world of Jesus, because the contexts of his consciousness could not have helped but be more classical than those presented there. Galilee, Judaea and Phoenicia were parts of the classical world in an age of high culture when knowledge and awareness of the historical contexts were unsurpassed. St Paul was a certified Roman citizen who could quote Euripides (I Corinthians 15:33). Jesus never took out Roman citizenship but he belonged to the Roman Empire at its most brilliant and peaceful, under Augustus and Tiberius, and his followers included members of the Jewish Senate or Sanhedrin who quite probably did enjoy formal Roman citizenship, like Paul. Jesus was rightly liable for taxes, as he acknowledged, for he lived under the pax romana as a beneficiary of the engineering expertise (roads) and cultural contributions (architecture) the classical centre provided, and which, as a civilised person, he must have viewed, admired and used on every hand. The cultural contexts in his part of the world had been increasingly classical since the time of Alexander the Great, and though Hebrew was still spoken by the Jews there, within a couple more centuries it would no longer be used in everyday conversation, surviving as a literary language. Jesus spoke Aramaic and probably Greek, the lingua franca of the empire on its eastern side. So it is perfectly valid to consider Jesus not just as a Galilean Jew but also as a member of the classical world of which he was a part. There is nothing in the Gospels to mark him out as an ignoramus. He was fully literate—he wrote, he read. The proximate Jewish world was not his only context, and in this brief article (intended as a research opportunity) I choose to sideline it for the interim. For the sake of countering an imbalance, I opt here to view Jesus within a classical perspective. Although I consider myself a Christian, my assumed point of view here is classical, non-Christian and Greco-Roman, effectively the likely view of Pontius Pilatus and the people to whom Pilatus reports: Lucius Aelius Seianus at Rome and Tiberius at Capreae. We are in Jerusalem in the year AUC 782—782 years ab urbe condita, from the founding of Rome. Not for hundreds of years will it be referred to as AD 29 (taking that as the year of the Crucifixion—it may have been AD 30, views differ). Pontius Pilatus is praefectus iudaeae. Tiberius is princeps, the first among the Roman senators, adopted son of the deceased and since deified Augustus (or “divi Augusti filius” on the coins Jesus handled—no one else in the empire is the son of a god, at least officially). Numerous times consul, holder of the tribunicia potestas (tribunician power), Tiberius lives a largely retired life on the island of Capreae, while at Rome Lucius Aelius Seianus acts as his deputy and de facto head of government. Pilatus reports either directly from Iudaea to Capreae, or more likely through Seianus at Rome. The mind of Jesus—literate and hence in some sense schooled—almost certainly included a spot not only for Tiberius among the eminent Romans of his day but also for Sejanus as the de facto executive power at Rome. Jesus may well have been able to tell you the names of the first two elected consuls each year (the most important part of the fasti, or annual register of magistrates), though he could hardly be expected to keep up with the suffect consuls elected to assist them, or anyone lower down in the executive hierarchy at Rome. [fusion_dropcap boxed="no" boxed_radius="" class="" id="" color="" hue="" saturation="" lightness="" alpha="" text_color=""]B[/fusion_dropcap]efore Pilatus judged Jesus, and judged him innocent, he interviewed him. Putting oneself in the room momentarily, what language are they speaking? It’s a thousand to one that Pilatus spoke Greek, the lingua franca out here, as well as Latin of course. It beggars belief to think he learned Aramaic—all the right people among the Jews spoke fluent Greek, he didn’t need to deal with the vulgus. Either Pilatus spoke with Jesus through an interpreter (not mentioned in the Gospels, though everything cannot be mentioned), or they spoke Greek, and I incline to the latter view. In one of the Gospels some visiting Greeks are brought to converse with Jesus, and again there is nothing about an interpreter. If Pilatus had heard of Jesus before this, what might he have been told by his lieutenants about this man and his whole cursus publicus, his movement? Certainly it wasn’t a democratic movement. Today many would frown upon it on that ground alone. Not only that, it was a theocratic movement focused on the Kingdom of God and, in that sense, in its political implications would be condemned outright in the modern secular West. We may forget (those of us who still like to think through the Lord’s Prayer occasionally) that when we silently say “Thy kingdom come” we follow it up with “Thy will be done in Earth as it is in Heaven”, thus connecting, syntactically and meaningfully, the theocracy of Heaven to the governance of the Earth on Earth, since without appropriate governance how can His will be properly done here? One thinks of Calvin’s Geneva and modern Iran. Jesus told Pilatus, in response to a question, that his Kingdom was not of this world, but there is ample evidence in the Gospels that the Kingdom was also to be understood as shadowed forth, or somehow coming into being, within this world also—plus those troubling words quoted above. The Kingdom was of course with Jesus, and already (at least in potentia) “within you” (perhaps “among you” is a better translation), as he told some hostile priests. Various interpretations are of course possible. In any case we have a strongly undemocratic and theocratic movement talking about a “Kingdom of God” to be brought about, prayerfully, “in Earth”. This is politically incomprehensible to a Roman brought up within a civic culture dependent on elections right up through the various levels of politics (the cursus honorum), just as it is politically incomprehensible in the West today. We hate theocracies—let there be democracy everywhere and theocracy nowhere, except in one’s heart where it can harm nobody. What else might Pilatus have heard? Perhaps that Jesus seemed averse to priests, flouted the letter of the law, and was not reported as attending a synagogue every Saturday, though he preached with authority in synagogues from time to time. None of that would have predisposed a Roman prefect against Jesus (quite the contrary), nor the fact that the dislike between Jesus and the priests was mutual. It must all have been very puzzling to Pilatus, like everything else in this unwelcoming country. Jesus was apparently a kind of priest himself, generally ambulant, and called “rabbi” by some (was he married?—all rabbis out here are married, aren’t they?). The religion of Judaea was fraught with quarrels, divergent schools locked in mutual hatred. Much that was taken for granted in Rome was anathema out here, or utterly inconceivable—consecrated female virgins, for example, so central to worship at the Temple of Vesta: nothing whatsoever like that in the Jewish religion. How could one bridge a cultural gap like that? What religious Jew could ever conceive of women consecrated to virginity in the name of religion?—something so venerable at Rome, so laughable out here, unsupported by Jewish history, writings or law, as the Jewish scholars attest. [fusion_dropcap boxed="no" boxed_radius="" class="" id="" color="" hue="" saturation="" lightness="" alpha="" text_color=""]T[/fusion_dropcap]he structure of the movement? Pilatus had probably heard something about it. There was a clear ductus principle, the dux in this instance being both teacher and leader. The movement, understood politically (and potentially almost everything, unfortunately, might develop political implications), was vertical in more ways than that. Under the dux there was apparently a kind of cabinet of twelve presided over by the dux—some sort of duodecemviri. Within that, there was an inner cabinet that included the dux—a quadrumviri, in which just three of the duodecemviri (namely Peter, James and John) had especially privileged access to the leader (as instanced in the revelatory Transfiguration incident, and elsewhere). Beneath the duodecemviri there was reported to exist a militant cadre, ever-growing in number, at one defined point consisting of seventy (a second source says seventy-two), all of them men presumably—though not necessarily, note, for they are called “the seventy”, not “the seventy men”. These fan out from the dux, taking the message of the Kingdom of God and its earthly leader to the wider world, beyond Iudaea even. Indeed Jesus himself had not limited his mission geographically to Galilee and the Roman province of Iudaea (Samaria, Judaea, Idumaea), but had taken it onto a wider street, north into Phoenicia, predominantly Gentile—up around Sidon and Tyre. Pilatus knew those people well. They had apparently been eager to hear the Nazarean, and some sort of miracle had been performed for a Gentile mother up there. To distance oneself from Pilatus’s fresh but narrow perspective for a while (he had little interest in Judaea, which he loathed), Jesus knew a lot about Rome and Roman history from the coins he regularly handled. What of Rome did he carry about in his consciousness? He handled a great variety of Roman coins, some of which had no doubt been circulating for fifty or more years, struck with inscriptions in Latin, many in Greek, that were intended to educate the ordinary people who used them—they functioned somewhat like newspapers. Jesus was conscious that one of the honours bestowed on Augustus was pater patriae, father of his country (many a coin told him that), that Augustus’s and Tiberius’s authority was constitutionally based on tribunicia potestas, the tribunician power, that Livia was augusta under Augustus and that Julia was augusta under Tiberius, and that the minting of all this informative coinage he was handling (which carried the marks of many different mints) was authorised by the Senate (a common inscription is SC: senatus consultum). He knew that Augustus as Octavian had won the Battle of Actium and captured Egypt from Marcus Antonius and Cleopatra (countless coins remained in circulation struck ACTIVM/AEGYPTO CAPTA). From coins he would also have known of the famous victories of Drusus the Elder, Tiberius and Germanicus in Germania from around the time of his birth. He quite likely knew of the destruction of three legions in Germania under Publius Quinctilius Varus in AD 9, when Jesus was around sixteen, because Varus had been well known in the East, having earlier been Governor of Syria and figuring on coins there. Around AD 15, when Jesus was about twenty-two, and following the death of Augustus, the long and famous funerary inscription res gestae divi augusti (“Things achieved by the divine Augustus”), which Augustus had composed a few years earlier as a public autobiography, was inscribed onto large marble slabs (bronze at Rome) and put up all over the empire, in Latin and Greek, for everyone to read. Great fragments of it from excavations all around the Mediterranean exist today, so that we have the complete text—indeed an almost complete copy was found at Ancyra. It was intended that everyone should have access to this public text and read it. The res gestae describes its author’s military and political career including his ending of the civil wars with the defeat of the armies of Brutus and Cassius and his establishment of a general peace following his victory at the Battle of Actium. It sets out his political philosophy and adherence (as he sees it) to the prescribed norms of republican government. His benefactions to the citizens of the wide-flung empire and their pecuniary value are listed in great detail. The Latin and Greek texts were deliberately written by Augustus in hyper-simple (and yet correct) language so that they could be read and understood by anyone half-literate in either language. Walking past it, any such person with the slightest historical curiosity would naturally glance through it. Jesus did not hate Romans, in fact he healed the servant of a Roman centurio (officer equivalent to our captain) whose nomen was Cornelius, on Cornelius’s request. This officer was a Latin-speaking Italian belonging to the Cohors II Italica, an auxiliary regiment (there were no legions in Iudaea at the time). Nor did Jesus suggest the officer quit his military position. There was another sympathetic centurion present at the Crucifixion. [fusion_dropcap boxed="no" boxed_radius="" class="" id="" color="" hue="" saturation="" lightness="" alpha="" text_color=""]G[/fusion_dropcap]iven the amount of travelling Jesus undertook throughout Iudaea and Phoenicia it is unlikely that he would never have come across the res gestae. Hadn’t everyone seen it? It was everywhere. And what it provides to all and sundry is an immense amount of information, as a glance at any English translation on the internet will show: a who’s who and comprehensive history of the Roman Empire under Augustus; a survey of all the provinces and their state; an account of social and religious reform programs carried out; and much else of great interest—information practically unavoidable except by those with closed minds. In the religious context it obviously does not matter much whether Jesus was conscious of what was happening in the wider classical world around him, for the comforts of which he paid his taxes. Most of his life is unrecorded, but for an historian interested in the purely human dimension certain assumptions, such as those offered here, seem reasonable. The Gospels suggest that Jesus was interested in his political world, which included Jewish senators and Italian military officers, and through all the lost years we can be sure he was doing more than sawing timber, cutting stone and meditating on the Father. He could hardly help hearing the news from far and wide, and he could read. The classical world was not absent from his mind. This is a Jesus with whom I could happily walk and talk (as is the other, though he is culturally more distant). The Gospel writers, however, were not much concerned with him. I have restricted attention to the informative texts Jesus knew—the coins and, most probably, the res gestae divi augusti. What other potential sources exist for an extended inquiry into his classical consciousness? An extendable list would include the classical archaeology of the first-century towns and cities he knew, from which are deducible the styles of the principal civic buildings; the identity of the Roman authorities of whom he was probably aware in the cities, wherever ascertainable from the literary or archaeological record; their political and social connections to the centre; the probable structure, make-up, weapons, uniforms and insignia of Cohors II Italica, and the likely kinds of servants employed by its officers; possible identification of the regiment of the centurion at the Crucifixion; and the relationship of carpentry to bridge engineering—for instance, would an intelligent and inquisitive carpenter take an interest in the Roman construction of bridges round about him? And where were those bridges?
Philip Ayres is the author of Fortunate Voyager: The Worlds of Ninian Stephen, published in September by Miegunyah/Melbourne University Press. He is also the author of other major civic biographies including Owen Dixon, as well as Classical Culture and the Idea of Rome in Eighteenth Century England (1997)
The post Jesus: A Classical Perspective first appeared on Quadrant.

GKP S7/E9 – The Hidden Truth Behind Maps, Myths, and Magnetic Monoliths

Sun, 13 Jul 2025 14:13:10 +1000
https://www.podbean.com/media/share/pb-b3ssp-19038ea G’day Folks, In this lively episode of the General Knowledge Podcast (Season 7, Episode 9), Lee, Ethan, and Andy reunite after a series of technical hiccups to dive into a rich and speculative discussion spanning ancient mythology, electric universe theory, and hidden cosmological truths. After expressing their mutual frustrations and relief at finally getting […]

Global Anglicanism’s Crisis of Authority

Sun, 13 Jul 2025 13:00:17 +1000

When Justin Welby was compromised by scandal and obliged to resign, he did not leave a religion-shaped hole. The hole was already there
The post Global Anglicanism’s Crisis of Authority first appeared on Quadrant.

The Dismal Science of Doom

Sun, 13 Jul 2025 04:57:58 +1000
[fusion_dropcap boxed="no" boxed_radius="" class="" id="" color="" hue="" saturation="" lightness="" alpha="" text_color=""]F[/fusion_dropcap]loods, droughts, hurricanes, bushfires, coral bleaching, algae blooms off South Australia, you name it, rascally climate change is behind it. It is now established science that almost all extreme weather-related events in recent decades are due to climate change which, in turn, is due to burning fossil fuels and other human and bovine activity. There were very few extreme weather-related events before climate change. There will be few extreme weather-related events once we have achieved net zero and beyond. We are living through a unique era of multitudinous extreme weather-related events, proving without doubt that achieving and then bettering net zero is the greatest moral challenge of our time. We don’t meet it, we’re dead. Quod erat demonstrandum. I was thinking about how this modern delusion, only modestly caricatured, has infected minds when perusing the results of a poll of 40 so-called “top economists” conducted by The Economics Society of Australia. The economists were given a menu of answers to choose from in response to some loaded questions on the power supply. As follows:
What do you believe is the most important and second most important of three goals in transforming Australia’s energy system? Achieving net zero by 2050 or ensuring reliability of the power supply or minimising the cost of generation and distribution.

What would be the optimal mix of energy resources in 2040 among coal, gas, renewables and nuclear?

What should be the policy instrument employed to achieve the optimal energy mix? Cap and trade carbon pricing or firm commitments not to extend the life of coal plants or subsidies for preferred forms of energy or an extension of the safeguard mechanism to most industries and firms or tax concessions for preferred forms of energy or direct government funding of preferred forms of energy.
It is without surprise, in these weather-threatening times, that 18 of the 40 economists polled put achieving Net Zero as the most important goal. Fifteen have no coal at all in the optimal mix by 2040. Over half have renewables accounting for 75% or more generation. Risibly, Professor John Quiggin (Queensland Uni) has 95% renewables. On average, across all of those polled, renewables contribute 69% to the optimal mix by 2040. Forget about the reliability of supply if that average came about, never mind the outliers. On my count only 8 contemplate nuclear in the optimal mix. Fifty percent of responses favour not extending the life of coal mines as part of the solution. No doubt those strongly against coal have a one-to-one correspondence with those who favour achieving Net Zero over the reliability of power supply. A case of moral posturing prevailing over keeping the lights on. [fusion_dropcap boxed="no" boxed_radius="" class="" id="" color="" hue="" saturation="" lightness="" alpha="" text_color=""]A[/fusion_dropcap]s you might imagine when it comes to policy instruments, cap-and-trade carbon pricing is the preferred choice of most economists. Economists like the idea of using a market mechanism even when they have not the least idea how it would actually work in practice. That is not their job. Remember the unfair criticism of the Resource Super Profits Tax (RSPT) devised by Treasury Secretary Ken Henry in 2012. Sure it was unworkable but excellent in theory. I intended to issue booby prizes to those who are most divorced from reality. Unfortunately, the boobies are too numerous to list. However, to end on a positive note, while a tiny few of those polled are better than woeful, Gigi Foster, from the University of NSW is a standout. She must feel extremely lonely in academia. Here is her marvelous response to the poll. No need to say more. Enjoy.
I don't like the premise of this question, which is that some bunch of future-tellers have any place predicting the precise energy mix that will be optimal in 15 years' time.

What I am confident about is that renewables have no chance of replacing fossil fuels; that we should use more of our wealth of gas reserves and also keep coal going for reliable base-load generation; and that we should consider nuclear. How to get there: Bring some French engineers over to Australia and pay them to advise us on the feasibility and optimal location and design of nuclear power generation in Australia. Also, wipe out all the special subsidies to "renewable" technology that are based on the net zero madness.
The post The Dismal Science of Doom first appeared on Quadrant.

The Hyper-Real Revolution: Why Real Experiences Are Becoming Obsolete | Video

Sat, 12 Jul 2025 19:11:00 +1000
At the center of our collective experience, we find a fabricated system of meaning that limits human participation to that of a mindless spectator, while a digital hyperreality is slowly born.

Alien Seed

Sat, 12 Jul 2025 12:04:00 +1000
[fusion_dropcap boxed="no" boxed_radius="" class="" id="" color="" hue="" saturation="" lightness="" alpha="" text_color=""]I[/fusion_dropcap]t is an unforgiving house. Airless and deathly cold, despite the rare September warmth. A thin light fills the empty rooms. Untenanted for months, vacancy emphasises the air of neglect and careless abuse. Strips of torn patterned paper hang from the walls and dull green paintwork flakes like dry skin from the doors and architraves. There’s a whiff of putrefaction, suggestive of something rotting under the floorboards. She has lived in such dark misused places; they do not reward love. The long, dank hall opens at the rear of the house onto a kind of conservatory, a glazed back porch that catches the afternoon sun. The door is off the latch and some sweet-smelling blossom enters on the warm breeze. Beyond the door there’s a flight of steps to the rear garden, a jungle of overgrown shrubs, rampant creeper and neglected fruit trees. Perhaps a man can be hired to mow the meandering tracks of grass, if not to maintain the shrubbery. She does not mind so much in the garden an air of verdant abandonment. The solicitor, Mr Donovan, a dour, grey-suited man of about forty-five, waits for her in the car. He helps her with her seatbelt buckle. “I know. It’ll need some work. But it’s a good location, close to the CBD. It would be worth putting some money into.” She has never owned a house before. Mr Donovan might think it ungrateful if she were to sell one gifted to her, but she has no desire to uproot at this late stage of her life. The Tasmanian winters would probably kill her and it’s not as if she has any connection to the house. Her father had never owned property before either, not before she left. An itinerant labourer most of his life, he bought it with lottery winnings. Something she would not have known if Mr Donovan had not enlightened her. She waits until the morning, then phones him from the motel. “I’m undecided. About the house. I don’t want to do anything rash.” She revisits the house alone. She opens doors and windows, unhooks the yellowing rags of net curtains, tears loose strips of wallpaper from the walls. Unloved and unlovely, the house nevertheless accepts her. She sleeps soundly—more or less—on an inexpensive bed. She fills the rooms judiciously with Mission Shop chairs, tables and a large wardrobe bearing the scars of worm infestation. Ready-made blinds and drapes hang from the windows. In the front room, there are shelves either side of the chimney breast that she lines with paperback books and cheap glass and china objects from the weekend markets. Mr Donovan has told her that the house will fetch a better price if it is sparely furnished; if it is at least nominally lived in, if only to disguise a little the evidence of neglect and careless occupation. She has not decided to stay but feels no urgency to return to Queensland. Mr Donovan has given her the number of a real estate agent if she does decide to sell. He arranges for the telephone to be connected, and the electricity and gas. She half expects a housewarming basket of fruit and a bottle of wine. He sends his son to work on her garden. She watches him from the sunroom. He’s been working for almost two hours, pulling weeds and stringy rampant grass from the flowerbeds. Every ten minutes or so he trundles a neighbour’s wheelbarrow around the lawn, collecting the rubbish he’s pulled and dumping it in a pile at the bottom of the garden. The day is quite hot, though there’s some shade from the trees and drooping branches. She’s nothing to offer him to drink, except water, which he accepts without comment. At the end of the day, she’ll pay for a pizza, if he wishes to order himself one. His father has said that she’s not to offer him money. He’s trying to instil some sense of self-discipline into the boy, who’s been in trouble at school lately. She tells herself it’s her age and her generation, but she wishes he’d told her also that his son was black. He’s too dark to be of mixed race, so she assumes he’s adopted. It makes no difference that—whatever his father’s complaint—he’s proved to be industrious and almost tiresomely polite. It would help if the boy were more engaging, less withdrawn. If he would laugh once in a while. She’d not call him sullen. He’s almost impossible to read, reacting to neither sharp comment nor twitching smile. A little after midday she takes him a glass of iced water. He’s examining something in the palm of his hand. “If it’s a bug, you can step on it.” He shows her what he has: a dull brown moth. “Moths are called Lepidoptera, did you know that? Moths and butterflies. They’re the same, really, except for their antennae and they hold their wings differently when they’re at rest. Butterfly wings are vertical, but moths, see, they lie flat.” She stares at the insect without interest. “Trust a boy to like creepy crawly things.” “Only moths and butterflies. Moths, really. I catch them in a trap and catalogue them, if I can identify them.” It’s the most the boy has spoken since he arrived. The discovery of the moth has drawn him a little out of his shell. “Mostly they come out at night,” he reveals in case she didn’t know. The insect in his hand appears to be dead. He flips his wrist and watches it float to the ground. “I’m hungry,” he says, rolling an ice cube around his mouth. “Let’s go to McDonald’s.” He’s called Ethan, an odd name, she thinks, for no logical reason, to give a black boy. Her own name, Oona, he sings back to her as if it was a song refrain. He drives her to McDonald’s in a little red car his parents bought him for his seventeenth birthday. She’s surprised to learn that he was adopted while Donovan was working for some NGO in Africa. Donovan had not struck her as being anything other than a staid provincial solicitor. “He does some consultancy work now, mostly through his practice,” Ethan tells her. His mother volunteers for City Mission. His memory of Juba, his birthplace in Sudan, is little more than fleeting images, like he’s recalling some elusive dream, he says. He knows Oona is Irish. He’s picked her accent, the whisper of it that lingers. She tells him she was born in Derry. “What’s it like?” She hesitates. “I hardly remember.” Walking back to the car he tells her that any discussion between his parents about Sudan is the same as about any other trouble spot they feel passionate about: politics and humanitarian aid. “They want me to be informed, you know, but not because I’m African. I’m not African to them, anyway. I’m not even black. It’s a sort of article of pride with them that they don’t see skin colour. Culture’s okay. Languages and shit.” He drives her home and thanks her for the Big Mac and Coke. He says he’ll come at the weekend with a lawnmower, but she tells him not to feel obliged. She knows how it is with teenagers. He’ll come once, and that will be the last she sees of him. She doesn’t think much about the boy again until the evening when she sees moths fluttering at the sunroom window. Small, white speckled insects, different from the drab brown specimen that Ethan had shown her. Lepidoptera. It surprises her that she should remember the word for them. She’s been thinking about Derry, where she was born, since the boy asked her about it, and wishes she could remember the place better. What she remembers is the grip of her mammy’s hand when they walked down the street, armoured cars on the corners, murals painted on the end of tenement blocks. Ethan’s young life seems blessed by comparison, though the boy seems altogether indifferent to it. One more indulged middle-class lad, it’s something that his preposterous, colour-blind parents have taught him good manners. At his age she lived half the year in a caravan with her father who followed the seasonal fruit-picking gigs. Though she’d not liked to ask, she can guess at the cause of Ethan’s trouble at school. She could have told him; speaking with a singsong lilt once was enough to get a kid into a schoolyard scrap. He comes again to mow the meandering tracks of ragged lawn. He brings his father’s lawnmower, squeezed with the handle folded down into the back of his little red car. She’d not expected him to return and guesses that it’s at his father’s insistence. The late spring day is hot and cloudless. He stops briefly to pull off his shirt. Does black skin burn? she wonders. She thinks it inappropriate to ask, though she’s more comfortable with him now. She’s not so much struck by his blackness. What she notices is the bruise under his left eye. And his knuckles are grazed as if they have been scraped against something hard and rough. He laughs when she asks if he has been in a scrap. When he’s finished, she brings him a glass of cold water. “I should pay you,” she says. “You can’t learn the value of enterprise if you work for nothing.” He swallows the water without pause, wiping his mouth with the back of his grazed hand. His bruised eye is half closed. Handing the glass back, he says, “I read this stuff about Ireland. The Troubles. Were you there then?” “We left before it got bad,” she says. “I was just a girl, eleven or twelve. I don’t dwell on those days, Ethan. It’s not my country anymore.” “I’m going to Africa next year. When I’m eighteen. I haven’t told anyone yet.” She wonders why he should tell her. “You must’ve told your parents.” “No. Specially not them. I want to go to Sudan.” He takes out his phone and checks it as if expecting an urgent message. “I’ve been reading this guy’s blog. He’s in America now, but he’s Sudanese. He was in an orphanage in Nimule for two years. Before that, when he was ten or eleven, he was in the LRA, the Lord’s Resistance Army. D’you know what he wrote? He used to eat people. These crazies, the LRA, they abducted Sudanese kids to fight the Ugandan government. And the guys they captured, the prisoners, they ate them. I bet they never did crazy stuff like that in Ireland.” She has invited a property consultant into the house to give her a valuation. The woman, overweight and bronchial, wheezes from room to room, jotting her observations into a spiral-bound notebook. She remarks on the sparsity of furniture, the empty bedrooms, the general air of temporary inhabitation and speculates that the property is an investment in the rental market. A little tired-looking, she comments, which she would not have, Oona suspects, if she had said it was her home. Perhaps she should have taken Donovan’s advice and acted on the cheapest of the painting contractors’ quotes. But it was vacant then; once she had moved in and furnished the place with budget essentials and weekend market bits and pieces, the question of its resale value lost its urgency. Years ago, in their itinerant days, whenever they made a new camp, her father would light a fire, pull up a little wooden stool and say he was warming his feet on the hearth. It was his way of saying that where they were was their home. She remembers this, watching the consultant lower her fat backside onto a spindle-legged kitchen chair that seems sadly inadequate to her weight. “I could get you a quick sale,” the woman tells her, “but not a good one. It’s a buyers’ market.” If she feels conflicted, the truth is she has no more reason to go than she has to stay. She has a life in Queensland, but not one that holds her there. Lovers have come and gone, she has a job she can return to if she wishes, friends who will put her up while she looks for someplace decent to rent. She’s not without means, at least not in the short term. And the house has begun to exert a pull on her that she doesn’t quite understand. She reports back to Donovan with the consultant’s assessment and is quizzed about Ethan. She says she’s not seen the boy since he came to mow the grass. “He’s left home,” Donovan confides. “He wants to go to Africa. Sudan. I told him it was a ridiculous idea. He knows what the situation is like there. He got angry, set fire to his room and simply vanished. We have no idea where he’s gone.” Such rage in the boy, Oona thinks with niggling disquiet, to set fire to his room. She wishes he had not confided in her. The Donovans’ anger, she suspects, is as deeply felt as Ethan’s. Fourteen years raising him as a nice middle-class white boy and he wants to go back to the savagery they saved him from. Two days later, she finds him sleeping in the wood store under the house. It’s early in the morning and she has come down into the garden to water the parched beds. The door to the wood store, which she has rarely entered since moving into the house, hangs open. Observing him, his long black legs stretched across the filthy floor, she is reminded of pictures in schoolbooks she read as a child: the escaped Negro slave caught hiding behind a sharecropper’s wood pile. She calls his name, sharply, and he wakes with a start. His odour of sweat and days sleeping rough overwhelms the smell of old dry wood. She cooks him scrambled eggs and bacon while he showers. He eats as she supposes all teenagers eat, as if it were his last meal, and seems nonplussed by the turmoil he has caused at home. She doesn’t ask him about it because she doesn’t want to know; because, at the age of seventeen, his life is his own to complicate, to fight for or throw away as he chooses. For all that, she expects him to leave once his clothes are dry and ironed, impressing on him that she doesn’t want to find him sleeping on her wood store floor again in the morning. Leaving him to wash the dishes, she wanders down the road to buy bread and a newspaper. It’s when she’s walking slowly back up the hill that she sees the little red car parked in a side street, partly hidden by a waste skip. A sweater and a jumble of magazines litter the back seat. She imagines that the car has been there since the day the boy went missing, as spiders have spun intricate webs across the headlights and around the door handles. “Joseph says an African in a white man’s country is always an African, no matter how much he pretends to be a white man. His skin colour is his identity. He’s defined by his skin colour because it’s different. He’s one of a distinctive minority, so he’s highly visible. Wherever he goes, people will say, that man is an African. But no one hears what he says when he talks to them. His voice can’t be heard when he speaks to people who are different from him. So he’s invisible too, because he doesn’t belong. He’s an alien seed in precious soil.” Joseph is Ethan’s mentor. In Omdurman he was a schoolmaster, a teacher of history and languages; in Australia he strips car wrecks for their working components. “Joseph says I’m Sudanese and I’ll only be happy if I embrace my ethnicity,” Ethan tells Oona. “He says if I allow others to define who I am, I’ll learn only to discriminate against those who are different. He says that is the path of fear and hate.” Oona has agreed to let the boy stay one night. He’s promised that tomorrow he’ll go home and talk to his parents. He says he wishes he’d not started the fire in his bedroom, because it was stupid and dangerous. It was the argument, particularly with his father. He just would not try to understand. And then being sent to his room, as if he was a child still, answering them back. He wanted them to see his anger and frustration; to feel its heat. “They got under my skin,” he admits. “They made me lose it.” Oona thinks it’s this Joseph who has got under Ethan’s skin. There’s a small group of them, young African men and boys who meet at a café on the shopping strip at the bottom of the road. Joseph is the oldest, the most articulate. He and two others, both younger than Ethan, are Sudanese. Ethan feels singled out because he has no experience of Africa or of the struggles these boys and their families endured to come to Australia. The boys’ talk is mostly of computer games or trail bike riding. “Joseph gets angry with them because already they’re forgetting their culture and traditions,” Ethan explains. “He said to them once, ‘Look at Ethan. An African with a Jewish name and the education of an English public schoolboy.’ All they did was laugh.” He gives Oona a rueful look. “That’s how fucked up I am.” Oona cooks baked beans and bacon for tea. The evening is so hot she’s brought her fan from the bedroom. Ethan eats in moody silence, much as she remembers her father doing when he came home drunk. Despite the heat, she shivers a little at the memory, knowing it was the cause of her leaving. Too many bruises and cracked ribs, she feared the one drunken rage that would have him kill her. He was always a heavy drinker, but rarely violent with it when she was a child. It was her mammy’s death that changed him. She’d gone to bed early one night and never woke up. Oona was sixteen and aneurism was a word she’d never heard before. Neither did she realise how helpless her father was without a woman to keep him from going off the rails. There were other women after that, some sadder than he was, but none who stayed. Oona stayed, longer than she needed to. Leaving wasn’t easy. Watching Ethan eat, she wants to tell him that some decisions can’t be undone. That not all fractures mend. Instead, she asks him if it is Joseph’s idea that he go back to Africa. “To Sudan,” he says explicitly. “He says I should reconnect with my roots. It doesn’t matter where I live. I need to know who I am.” Mammy’s advice for a good life was to marry and have kids. It wasn’t advice Oona had followed, but she could tell Ethan children are roots, nature’s grounding. It seems pointless as long as Joseph has him under his spell. Her father had never forgiven her for leaving. Three or four times over the years she tried to reconnect, but he always rebuffed her. He must have regretted it late in life to leave his house to her. They’d lost touch by then and she didn’t know he was dead until Donovan’s letter found her. Clearing the dishes, she serves the last of a tub of ice-cream she’d not bought to share. “Did you never want to go back to Ireland?” Ethan asks suddenly, and she takes a moment to answer. Mammy talked sometimes of going home, she recalls, her father never. At least, not while she was living with him. “My father bought this house with money he won on the lottery. I learnt that from your father. Your father knew more about my father than I did.” A moth is flickering around the lightbulb. Lepidoptera, she thinks absently. Ethan seems uninterested. “My father only lived here for a few months,” she tells him. “He moved in with a woman he met and let this place out. When she died, her family took possession of her house and put him on the street. He couldn’t move back here because it was under lease.” Donovan had told her this. Donovan had been her father’s solicitor since the lottery win. It was Donovan who drew up her father’s will in which he bequeathed the house to his estranged daughter. “We always lived in rented digs when I was growing up,” she tells Ethan. “We never had a permanent home.” She watches the boy scoop the last of his ice-cream into his mouth. She doesn’t know why she’s telling him this. The point was, her father wasn’t without means when he found himself out on the street. He could have moved into a hotel for a few months until his tenant’s lease ended. At the age of eighty-six, he could afford to indulge himself a little. Instead, he bought an airline ticket and flew home to Ireland, to Derry. And died there. Potential buyers have been to look at the house. Oona sits in the sunroom or in the garden while the bronchial consultant spruiks the property’s potential. A schoolteacher with a tiny, sad-faced wife wants a cottage or small, low-maintenance property for his retired parents who are moving out from England. A builder wants something cheap to renovate and make a tidy profit on resale. Young couples with babies or bored primary-school children spend interminable minutes arguing about the size of bedrooms, creaking floorboards, kitchen makeovers, traffic in the street. A widowed church minister is relocating from the country. They drift in and out like bargain hunters at a charity auction, finding nothing to their liking. The consultant says it is early days. Ethan has been home and gone again. The consultant, who knows the solicitor well, says the boy has fallen in with a gang of youths on the north side who harass shopkeepers and university students. The newspaper reports bashings and taxi drivers being robbed of their fare takings. On the evening news Oona sees images of fighting and looting in Khartoum, buildings reduced to rubble. A United Nations spokesman speaks of a humanitarian crisis. Ethan had been unperturbed about the political turmoil in Sudan. He said Joseph knew people, good people who would look out for him. She wonders if he still seeks Joseph’s counsel or whether a break with his mentor is the cause of his falling in with a gang of delinquents. One busy Saturday morning she sees him walking through the city mall, his arm around an under-dressed sticklike girl as pale as a cadaver. He catches her eye as they pass and looks right through her. In the new year she considers a brief trip to Queensland to catch up with her friends who say they are missing her. She checks out the used car ads for something small and cheap to run. She starts evening classes, looks for a part-time job. Twice now she’s been to lunch with a retired chiropractor she met at an afternoon movie session. She’s not spoken with Donovan in weeks and now the consultant rarely calls. A neighbour is paid to mow the grass and trim the hedges. She’s put a padlock on the wood store and monitors he

Soccer vs Psychosis

Sat, 12 Jul 2025 00:06:09 +1000
[fusion_dropcap boxed="no" boxed_radius="" class="" id="" color="" hue="" saturation="" lightness="" alpha="" text_color=""]T[/fusion_dropcap]hose who have never had to face it can only imagine the pressure columnists in the legacy media must feel to come up with a new theme every week. Unless you're Phillip Adams, whom The Australian indulges to bore on and on and on with repetitious accounts of his horrible father, his primary school days and, of course, himself, it must be tax the lesser scribblers who ask themselves 'What instant profundities can I assemble today?' We can only guess at those times when something akin to panic sets in as deadline draws near -- a thought raised by Waleed Aly's latest in Friday's Silly Morning Herald, where he maunders about the death of Liverpool FC's Diogo Jota and his brother in a high speed car crash. Golly gosh, Wally must have been be hard up for inspiration this week, I thought, most uncharitably. Not to be bitchy, but the column plods across the same turf -- celebrity, death, fandom and mass adulation -- which Peter Smith covered with greater aplomb last weekend at QOL. You're late to the ball, Waleed, and less eloquent besides. Such was the surmise until way, way down the column the art and artifice of a Gold Logie winner was revealed. "Deaths matter to us when we attach them to a story that moves us," observes Aly, finally getting to the real point of his piece:
...another professional footballer was killed on the same day as Jota. His name was Muhannad Fadl Al-Lili. The Palestinian Football Association said he died in his home in a Gaza refugee camp when an Israeli drone fired a missile on (sic) it.
Aly makes his grand point in the column's final sentence,
...you cannot mourn someone you cannot see.
Get it? The world couldn't care less about one life among the thousands scythed by the Zionist Reaper's relentless blood lust. Well done, Aly! All that preliminary yabber about Joto, it was your oh-so-clever device to set up the knockout punch, which actually lives or dies on readers' ignorance of round-ball politics in Gaza and the West Bank, not to mention a few other pointedly unmentioned details in regard to the Palestinian Football Association (PFA). Mind you, for readers of the Nine comics, opinionated ignorance is a given. The first thing Aly overlooked is that the PFA is very much a Hamas operation and, in its own baggy-shorts way, every bit an example of the militant fanaticism which brought utter destruction upon Gaza after the butchering of 1200 Jews because, well, they were Jews and isn't that reason enough? Know also that the head of soccer in Gaza is Abd al-Salam Haniyeh. Recognise that last name? He's the son of Ismail Haniyeh, the Hamas chief dispatched by Israel in July last year to frolic with his 72 perpetual virgins. That's the younger Haniyeh at right. A beefy fellow, he appears to have secured more than adequate sustenance despite all we read and hear about Israel's alleged campaign of genocidal starvation. Being a card-carrying Hamas nob evidently has its advantages. [fusion_dropcap boxed="no" boxed_radius="" class="" id="" color="" hue="" saturation="" lightness="" alpha="" text_color=""]W[/fusion_dropcap]e're not responsible for our parents, of course, but it isn't really possible to give Salam the benefit of the doubt, not after reading this ESPN profile. The article bends over backwards to be "fair", but only in the way mainstream organs of the left -- and ESPN is very much on that side of the ledger -- go about the "fairness" routine. The soccer chief's words suggest that the balancing act must have been a heck of a challenge for the writer. In Gaza, you see, competence on the pitch is important, but it isn't everything:
[Haniyeh] says players are chosen for the team not only for their skill, but for their commitment to the cause.
So Palestinian athletes are ranked on the soundness of their hatred for Jews? Who would have thought it, certainly not Aly, who might also have imparted a little history about the original Palestinians. Below, a clip from the the encounter between Australia and the Palestinian tourists at the Sydney Cricket Ground in 1939. [embed]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z2ACYGEmkGk[/embed] Yes, remarkably those "Palestinians" are all Jews, as the clip's politically incorrect commentator notes in hailing their goalkeeper's skills as typical of "a member of a saving race". But Salam Haniyeh isn't so easily fooled when it comes to Zionist ruses. "This is fake. The Israelis say these claims. It's not true," he told the ESPN reporter. "They think they own the land." To acknowledge what the record books say, and what a wealth of archival photos of players in jerseys emblazoned with Hebrew script also place beyond doubt, would be an admission that Jews were thick on the ground in their ancestral homeland well before the birth of Israel in 1948. Haniyeh can't have reality intrude. His dad's Hamas mates get pretty shirty about that sort of thing. Allah only knows, but they might restrict his access to the buffet. Later in the ESPN story reality cops another beating. Having teed-up interviews with Palestinian players and officials, the reporter is suddenly informed those meetings have been cancelled. The reason is straight out of the Handbook of Psychiatrict Illness: ESPN is owned by Disney, and the Hamasniks have concluded the Mouse House is another Zionist entity. And here is where we get to the missing distinction between Diogo Jotta and Muhannad Fadl Al-Lili. The former was, as Aly acknowledges, a sweetheart of a bloke playing for a team whose only business is soccer, entertainment and turning a pro-sport dollar. Al-Lili, well he was cursed to be born into a culture that glorifies death and violence, rejects reality whenever it suits, and treats soccer as war by other means. Al-Lili, too, might well have been a lovely fellow but it's chalk and cheese. One was a sportsman pure and simple, the other the doomed flag-bearer of a sick and psychotic society. Poor bugger, he never really had a chance.
The post Soccer vs Psychosis first appeared on Quadrant.

Trump administration concludes Jeffrey Epstein committed suicide, ‘had no client list’

Fri, 11 Jul 2025 07:11:00 +1000
A review ordered by Trump-appointed leadership of the Justice Department and the FBI says they have found “no evidence” that Jeffrey Epstein kept a client list of associates whom he blackmailed or conspired with, nor was he murdered in his jail cell.

One Law, Please, for All Australians

Fri, 11 Jul 2025 06:30:10 +1000
[fusion_dropcap boxed="no" boxed_radius="" class="" id="" color="" hue="" saturation="" lightness="" alpha="" text_color=""]T[/fusion_dropcap]he Yoorrook Justice Commission’s final report has arrived. Indulge me to provide a brief response, focusing on three key elements of the report: the ssumed impact of colonisation, cultural safety, and self-determination. I choose these three because they are prominent in the report and, more importantly, because they are part of the standard rhetoric that has shaped Aboriginal affairs over recent decades. With regard to colonisation, the Commission’s summary report states: “First Peoples’ lives are profoundly shaped by the enduring impact of colonial invasion...” Really? Could invoking the past be more about excuse-making in the present? Stan Grant, in his 2016 Quarterly Essay, wrote: “But history—the history of dispossession and ensuing suffering—can be an all-too convenient explanation for what ails us.” Could that be what is happening here? The final report states that “the brutality of colonisation” has in part contributed to “higher rates of drug and alcohol issues, family violence, housing instability and homelessness” for Aboriginal Victorians. Those problems affecting Aboriginal people just described are real. We all agree on this. However, the cause isn’t colonisation. Or at least it’s not a major factor. Were it a major cause, then all Aboriginal Australians could claim to be suffering and unable to move on. However, many Aboriginal Australians are doing very well today -- and have done so for decades. How well are the Aboriginal authors of the Yoorrook report doing? Has colonisation held them back? It wouldn't appear so. I’m not saying that colonisation is irrelevant, but only that assigning it as a significant cause of the problems facing Aboriginal Australians’ today is misleading and extremely disempowering. Colonisation, or a person’s past more generally, is but one factor among many that determines behaviour and wellbeing today. In Australia it doesn’t matter how unfortunate your past or current circumstances are, there are always fellow Aussies, both Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal, ready to lend a helping hand. That’s what we do. Utilising the help available is what enables people to thrive. Perhaps people are not victims of the past, but only victims of the lies they have been fed about their past? Of course, the term ‘cultural safety’ featured prominently throughout the report. To give but one example:
Cultural safety and stability is the first thing that is needed to help young people in custody. There is nothing better for rehabilitating a kid who has been in custody to be able to learn about their roots, find connection in that with their family and kin, and return to Country once they are released.
I agree that safety and stability are crucial for laying a good foundation in life, but what exactly is ‘cultural safety and stability’? I guess it’s like ‘white privilege’ and ‘systemic racism’. You're just expected to know what it is. [fusion_dropcap boxed="no" boxed_radius="" class="" id="" color="" hue="" saturation="" lightness="" alpha="" text_color=""]T[/fusion_dropcap]each these kids that they are Australians with the same needs as other Australians and that they are not the endless victims of colonisation or racism, and they will be less likely to end up in custody in the first place. So why do the authors of the Yoorrook Report harp on about cultural safety? Janet Albrechtsen nailed it in The Weekend Australian recently when she wrote that cultural safety is a term that “keeps Indigenous activists and academics in jobs.” If that’s all it did, that would be fine. Sadly, it is more victim-brigade rhetoric that will condemn far too many children to a hell-like existence. So how is this miserable existence inflicted? The term ‘cultural safety’ and similar expressions such as ‘culturally appropriate’ are code for the insistence that only Aboriginal people should be the ones helping Aboriginal people. This is often presented as ‘self-determination.’ Quoting from the Yoorrook summary report
Self-determination means transferring decision-making power, authority, control and resources to First Peoples … so that [they] can make decisions about the things that affect them.
But isn’t self-determination a good thing? Don’t all Australians have the right to self-determination? Well, it depends on your definition. It is good when applied at the level of the individual, where it means making decisions or taking actions that you believe to be in your best interest. For example, you and I may decide we want to get healthy, but ultimately, we each decide for ourselves how best to reach that goal. You might choose going to the gym, while I might choose to walk and swim. At the group level, self-determination typically means members of the group making decisions on behalf of, and for, other group members. The Yoorrook report calls it a “collective right.” For Aboriginal Australians, such an approach might have some merit if they were an homogenous group whose members had vastly different needs from non-Aboriginal Australians. However, none of this true. Aboriginal Australians are very diverse in nature and have the same fundamental human needs as non-Aboriginal Australians. In the case of Aboriginal people where the Yoorrook Commission applies self-determination in a collective sense, it is actually separatism. That is, Aboriginal Australians are kept separate from other Australians, perhaps not in a physical sense, but in terms of what services are required to address their needs and how they access them. All this does is encourage an us-and-them mentality. Importantly, the report mentions how self-determination is needed for child protection. For any child in need of out-of-home care, selection of a carer should be about competence and not colour. I am all for Aboriginal people being active in roles that contribute to the health and wellbeing of other Aboriginal people. However, non-Aboriginal people also have the right to help their fellow Australians, who just happen to have some Aboriginal ancestry. And of course, Aboriginal Australians also have the right to help non-Aboriginal Australians. I see this simply as Australians helping other Australians. How well has the separatist approach worked? Former Norther Territory politician Alison Anderson, an Aborigine, has stated: “The idea that separate development was the answer provided hope for many and jobs for an increasingly powerful few. However, it has failed.” We know what works: recognise that Aboriginal Australians have the same fundamental needs as other Australians. Recognise that the commonalities between both groups far outweigh any differences. And of course, never forget that Aboriginal affairs is everyone’s business. For the next state or territory thinking of conducting a similar truth-telling exercise, I hope I have saved you time and money.
The post One Law, Please, for All Australians first appeared on Quadrant.

A Tale of Two Apostates

Fri, 11 Jul 2025 05:00:18 +1000

What it means to be a conservative or revolutionary, or a blend of the two, is being redefined in these, our interesting times
The post A Tale of Two Apostates first appeared on Quadrant.

The ABC and Corruption in High Places

Fri, 11 Jul 2025 00:40:42 +1000
[fusion_dropcap boxed="no" boxed_radius="" class="" id="" color="" hue="" saturation="" lightness="" alpha="" text_color=""]S[/fusion_dropcap]tories of corruption in high places have always been a good drawcard for readers of the news media and it is no surprise that many journalists have a strong appetite for such fare. And because such corruption is usually well covered up, a form of journalistic investigation has emerged to expose it, in which reporters adopt the same kind of forensic techniques as police detectives. Journalists who do this also persuade their employers to give them far more time to pursue their research than is usual in the daily news cycle. The great American tradition of investigative journalism goes back to the early twentieth century when the radical ‘muckrakers’ Lincoln Steffens and Upton Sinclair exposed corrupt practices by corporations, government and political parties. In the 1970s, the investigations of Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein of the Washington Post forced the resignation of President Richard Nixon and, in the process, turned them into celebrities and authors of best-selling books. Many Australian journalists, too, have seen this approach to the job as their path to glory.
First published in our July 2022 issue. Click here to subscribe
However, at the ABC today, these ideas and practices are now largely out of control. Editorial oversight of the stories investigative journalists pursue and the quality of the evidence they gather is conspicuous by its absence. As readers of All the President’s Men well know, the investigations by Woodward and Bernstein were closely monitored at every stage of their research and writing by the Post’s executive editor Ben Bradlee. At the ABC, there is no one with that degree of authority or expertise to control what journalists do. The proof of this is the recent career of Louise Milligan, who calls herself an investigate journalist and who has made it her ambition to destroy the reputations and careers of no less than three prominent Australian men: the leading figure of the Catholic Church, Cardinal George Pell, the Attorney-General in the Morrison government, Christian Porter, and most recently, Prime Minister Scott Morrison himself. However, as I show in detail at several stages of my book The Persecution of George Pell, Milligan’s own practice of journalism leaves a lot to be desired. In her pursuit of Cardinal Pell, she was clearly out of her depth in her attempt to apply investigative journalism techniques to accusations of child sexual abuse. Her work was riddled with errors, she invented some facts, and she covered up others that told against her version of events. [fusion_dropcap boxed="no" boxed_radius="" class="" id="" color="" hue="" saturation="" lightness="" alpha="" text_color=""]O[/fusion_dropcap]ne example: Several of the characters she quoted making claims of child sexual abuse against Pell had criminal backgrounds and were clearly unreliable witnesses. However, to shore up the case in her book Cardinal, Milligan portrayed Pell’s principal accuser, Witness J, the choirboy who claims Pell sexually assaulted him in St Patrick’s Cathedral, as a cleanskin: “he hasn’t had trouble with the law … he is a pillar of his community”, she wrote. Yet at the committal hearings in the Melbourne Magistrate’s Court in March 2018, Pell’s lawyer Robert Richter made Witness J admit he had warrants outstanding from the Victorian Sheriff’s Office of no less than $10,000, which he was paying off at the time. Now, you don't accumulate debts like this from unpaid parking fines or speeding tickets. You need more than misdemeanors to rack up a tally this big. A real investigative journalist would have found out what offences Pell’s accuser had committed and not deceived her readers about the real trouble he had with the law. One more example: One of Milligan’s principal sources, who claimed Pell’s alleged abuse of Witness J’s choirboy friend turned the latter into a heroin addict, was the father of that friend. Assuring readers the father was a reliable informant, Milligan described him as “an honorary probation officer”. However, this father was well-known in certain circles in Melbourne for other skills. In the 1990s, while the son was attending the posh St Kevin’s College in Toorak and singing in St Patrick’s Cathedral choir, the father, under the pseudonym of “Master Joe”, was a performer in the city at bondage and discipline sex clubs. He was also registered as proprietor of a sex toy shop in Pascoe Vale, and later had a business in regional Victoria with a woman providing bondage and sadomasochistic services. Rather than sex in the priests’ sacristy being the cause of the boy’s descent into heroin addiction, the most obvious candidate for his desire to blot out his world was his discovery of his father’s sordid occupation. Milligan mentions none of this in her book or her broadcasts. This omission is telling about both her skills and the quality of her journalism. If she did not know about Master Joe, her investigative skills are virtually non-existent since several other journalists in Melbourne at the time of Pell’s trial knew and could have told her. Or if she did find out about Master Joe but deliberately omitted him from her story, she is guilty of airbrushing the truth to avoid spoiling her case against Pell. There are plenty of other similar examples detailed in my book. One of Milligan’s most distasteful characteristics, which the ABC makes little attempt to control, is her obsession with publicly defending herself on Twitter. She makes many statements on the social media platform about her ABC reports without running them by any editor, or getting them legalled. She is free to say what she likes about her work for the corporation. This was on display in May when Christian Porter reached an agreement with the ABC’s legal advisers following his defamation suit against Milligan and the corporation for identifying him as the rapist of a schoolgirl when he was seventeen. There had been no credible evidence produced against Porter in this case. All that existed were written notes by a deceased woman who suffered bipolar disorder and consequent false memories, who provided no corroboration for her claims, and who, before she committed suicide, told police she wanted to withdraw the rape accusation. Under the agreement that emerged from the defamation case, the ABC paid Porter’s legal counsel $100,000 in costs and said:
On 26 February 2021, the ABC published an article by Louise Milligan. That article was about a letter to the Prime Minister containing allegations against a senior cabinet minister. Although he was not named, the article was about the Attorney-General Christian Porter. The ABC did not intend to suggest that Mr Porter had committed the criminal offences alleged … However, both parties accept that some readers misinterpreted the article as an accusation of guilt against Mr Porter. That reading, which was not intended by the ABC, is regretted.
However, as soon as this agreement was signed, Milligan tweeted that her story had been right all along:
“Christian Porter has discontinued his case. The ABC will pay him no damages. I stand by my journalism.”
[fusion_dropcap boxed="no" boxed_radius="" class="" id="" color="" hue="" saturation="" lightness="" alpha="" text_color=""]M[/fusion_dropcap]oreover, one of the conditions of their agreement was that parts of the ABC’s legal defence, which its legal advisers conceded contained “scandalous material”, were not to be publicised and were to be removed from the court files. Nonetheless, Milligan stated on Twitter that she still hoped these parts of the corporation’s document would be made public. Porter’s lawyer, Rebekah Giles, responded, saying the ABC had agreed to never release the information contained in the legal defence. Giles said:
It is astonishing that Ms Milligan and other employees of the ABC have now seen fit to publish statements inconsistent with the settlement that they themselves personally agreed to. Further, the suggestion by Ms Milligan that she wants the defence to be released when she has (apparently in good faith) agreed to it being removed from the court file.
The attempt by Four Corners and Milligan to undermine the reputation of Scott Morrison has even less connection with reality than the accusations against Porter. There was nothing new about the story Milligan chose to do this: no discovery by her of previously unknown documents or witnesses, no good or timely reason to revive it. The story has been floating around online newssheets, social media and anonymous internet commentary for more than eighteen months. It first appeared in the Guardian Australia in October 2019. The online site wrote that the PM’s wife Jenny had once employed a friend of hers at Kirribilli House to look after her children. At that time, the friend’s husband had been posting a series of Tweets supporting the mad conspiracy theories of the right-wing American QAnon movement. These theories claimed that Donald Trump’s presidency was under attack from a powerful “deep state” movement, which protected various satanic paedophile rings whose ultimate aim was to take over the world. In 2019, the FBI identified QAnon and groups based on similarly bizarre conspiracy theories as potential domestic terrorist threats. There were later allegations that QAnon followers were among the rioters on the Capitol in Washington in January 2021. The Guardian article admitted that the employment of Jenny Morrison’s friend involved no political or advisory role, and there was no suggestion that her friend’s husband had influenced, or even spoken to, the Prime Minister about these views. However, other reporters were less scrupulous. Soon after the Guardian story appeared, David Hardaker, a former ABC journalist on Four Corners and 7.30 Report but then writing for the online news sheet Crikey, claimed this so-called connection with QAnon posed “a potential security threat” to Australia. Hardaker identified Jenny Morrison’s friend as Lynelle Stewart and named her husband Tim Stewart as the author of the tweets. Hardaker could only offer one connection between QAnon and Morrison. Hardaker said Tim Stewart’s tweets depicted elaborate ceremonies where children were prepared for sacrifice by groups of Satan worshipers. Stewart referred to this as “Luciferian” or satanic “ritual abuse”. The connection with Morrison supposedly occurred on October 22 2018 when, in response to a recommendation by the Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse, Morrison made his public apology to victims. He said: “The crimes of ritual sexual abuse happened in schools, churches, youth groups, scout troops, orphanages, foster homes, sporting clubs, group homes, charities, and in family homes as well.” Hardaker claimed Morrison’s use of the word “ritual” revealed his acceptance of the QAnon theory. Hardaker wrote:
“Ritual sexual abuse”? This was not a phrase used by the Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sex Abuse — yet it had made its way the PM’s historic address to the nation.
This one use of the word “ritual” was all he had to go on. But journalist Samantha Maiden wrote in news.com.au that others had followed this interpretation:
It follows widespread claims online that there was some significance to the Prime Minister referring to “ritual” sex abuse in a speech on institutional sex abuse. The use of the term “ritual” is often deployed by QAnon supporters in the context of their belief that the world has been overtaken by Satan-worshipping paedophiles.
In Louise Milligan’s story on Four Corners on June 14, which largely repeats the version of events given by Hardaker, she interviewed Michael Salter, a criminologist at the University of New South Wales, who also endorsed the claim that the term “ritual” was not in public usage when Morrison made his 2018 apology and that the term must come from QAnon’s Australian supporters. However, any connection between Morrison’s speech and QAnon’s theories is absurd. Morrison did not need help from Tim Stewart or anyone else to use the term “ritual”. Contrary to the claims by Hardaker and Salter, the concept of ritual child abuse was part of the investigations of the Royal Commission. In its various volumes, the Commission used the term “ritual” several times in relation to child abuse activities. In the executive summary of its Final Report in 2017, it summarised:
In private sessions and case studies we heard about children experiencing sexual abuse in places of worship or related locations such as a confessional, a priest’s residence or a ritual bathhouse … We also heard that some children experienced sexual abuse that involved the use of religious rituals, symbols or language.
Two of the major witnesses at its hearings, Gordon Hill and Cathy Kezelman, both claimed to have been sexually abused as children during religious rituals. Some of the bizarre assaults Hill told the Commission he suffered at the hands of priests and nuns at St Joseph’s orphanage at Ballarat, were supposedly conducted in a satanically decorated “dungeon”. Kezelman claimed she had “recovered memories” of her childhood when she was subject to “satanic sexual rituals” by her father and other satanic abusers in a cave near Brisbane. Kezelman wrote a book, Innocence Revisited, recounting all this in lurid detail. Kezelman was taken seriously by the Royal Commission and it appointed her to write counselling guidelines for staff at sexual assault clinics. In other words, “ritual” was not a rare term in 2018 and no connection to QAnon follows from Morrison’s use of it. It should be said that not everyone at the ABC accepted the “ritual” connection. After he saw a rough-cut draft of Milligan’s story, news director Gaven Morris was concerned enough to send it up to managing director David Anderson for appraisal. Anderson sent the draft back to Four Corners saying it needed “more work”. Before the story was broadcast, Paul Barry, the presenter of the ABC’s Media Watch program, was one of those who observed that the attempt to connect Morrison to QAnon through his use of the term “ritual” was barely credible. Barry told his viewers:
Now, as proof of influence over the PM, you may think that is not super strong. And while Milligan is no doubt aiming to firm up any evidence, some in ABC editorial management still regard it as thin.
However, the ABC’s news director and managing director both proved incapable of diverting Milligan from her objective. They saw very little of the “more work” they told her to do. She went ahead and in the story broadcast on June 14 treated the feeble claim about “ritual” as if it was somehow proof of Morrison’s guilt. Management had revealed itself powerless to stop her. In the hands of some of the most celebrated people who call themselves investigative journalists today, fanciful rubbish of this kind is what now passes as evidence for media attacks on political targets. In other words, “corruption in high places” is a phrase that now applies as much to the corporations of today’s news media as to the worst of the institutions that the once great tradition of investigative journalism originally set out to expose. Keith Windschuttle, who passed away on April 8, was Quadrant's editor and is much missed
The post The ABC and Corruption in High Places first appeared on Quadrant.

Scientists find widespread microplastics in human reproductive fluids

Thu, 10 Jul 2025 07:11:00 +1000
Researchers have detected toxic microplastic particles in male semen and female follicular fluids for the first time, raising concerns about potential risks to health and fertility.

AI – 1 Humans – 0 – ConspiracyOz

Wed, 09 Jul 2025 19:29:32 +1000

Time to be a Plumber eh! – Mick Raven

Godfather of AI_ I Tried to Warn Them, But We’ve Already Lost Control!

He pioneered AI, now he’s warning the world. Godfather of AI Geoffrey Hinton breaks his silence on the deadly dangers of AI no one is prepared for. Geoffrey Hinton is a leading computer scientist and cognitive psychologist, widely recognised as the ‘Godfather of AI’ for his pioneering work on neural networks and deep learning. He received the 2018 Turing Award, often called the Nobel Prize of computing. In 2023, he left Google to warn people about the rising dangers of AI.

Would you PAY to spend your life as a virtual NPC?

Mon, 07 Jul 2025 19:11:00 +1000
In the modern world, we are witnessing an increase in the number of people who prefer to exist as a digital inhabitant in a virtual realm, more than they wish to live inside of their own real lives.

Evolve or Die? – ConspiracyOz

Sun, 06 Jul 2025 21:49:40 +1000

I’m sorry Dave I’m afraid I can’t do that! (HAL 9000, 2001 Space Odessey) – Mick Raven

Joe Rogan Experience #2345 – Roman Yampolskiy 4th July 2025

Roman Yampolskiy – Wikipedia

AI in Australia_ Business Growth & Trends 2025

Xbox Game Studios exec gives ‘AI prompts’ to laid-off Microsoft employees     July 6th 2025

Job losses from AI are here now, and Ford’s CEO thinks “literally half” of white-collar jobs are at risk    July 3rd 2025

CEOs Start Saying the Quiet Part Out Loud_ AI Will Wipe Out Jobs   July 2nd 2025

Artificial intelligence set to change the workforce, impacting graduate jobs, new research reveals    2nd July 2025

Tasmania enters the ‘AI race’ with Firmus Technologies factory in north of state 2nd July 2025

So It Begins…Is This A Real Band Or AI 1st July 2025

The economic reform round table should discuss AI and robots, not just tax and productivity    30 June 2025

Experts concerned about training of AI superintelligence    24 June 2025

Bosses warn of job losses to AI     23 June 2025

Amazon’s bleak job update exposes major AI warning for Aussie workers_ ‘Will reduce’    19 June 2025

Bosses warn of job losses to AI 19 June 2025

AI warning following ‘extraordinary’ prediction half of entry-level white collar jobs will be wiped out   12 June 2025

AI jobs_ Apocalypse or a four-day week    June 7 2025

$400,000 salary job proves the AI revolution is well and truly underway    June 3, 2025

Anthropic CEO warns AI could wipe out 1 in 2 white collar jobs in next five years   May 31 2025

AI job cuts_ Artificial intelligence could kill WFH and send unemployment to 20 per cent    30 May 2025

Telstra expects to shrink workforce as it leans in ‘hard’ on AI    27 May 2025

AI is driving data centre growth — and it’s bringing environmental challenges 20th May 2025

Australia’s renewables can power AI and slash energy costs    31 March 2025

One in three workers at risk from AI_ Unions call for fair go in the digital age   Dec 10 2024

Unions call for worker-centric AI laws as report finds one in three Aussies at risk of losing their job 12th October 2024

AI in Energy_ Transforming Australia’s Power Sector    Aug 28th, 2024

Commonwealth Bank, Westpac, ANZ and NAB cut more than 2000 jobs this year    9 Oct 2023

‘We all got AI-ed’_ The Australian jobs being lost to AI under the radar   2023

Allegory of the cave – Wikipedia

Red Energy? Maybe Not – ConspiracyOz

Sun, 06 Jul 2025 19:59:26 +1000

Do the research Ppl, nearly changed to this Energy retailer – Mick Raven

Compare Electricity Plans And Providers _ Canstar Blue 2025

Red Energy reviews _ ProductReview.com.au 4th July 2025

The staff was very rude. Waiting 1 hour ,the staff promised to call back after hanging up but did not call back 2d

I want Red energy to respond to my numerous emails in regards to my now overdue bill. I have repeatedly tried to contact them to no availe. They are charging through the roof compared to others. 1w

Click bait! decided to sign up with red energy with recent price hikes in NSW encouraged me to look for a better energy provider – their plans seemed very competitive until I received an email AFTER saying I signed up on said rates saying actual rates will be confirmed before connection – actual rates were significantly higher plus a high load rate 6d

CEO and company posting record profits and bonuses paid yet they try to justify a 25% rates rise. Costing me $50 more per quarter just to be connected! And the usage charges went up too! I say this wholeheartedly, that I hope the members of the board get aggressive untreatable cancers. 2w

Red Energy Pty Limited Alleged breaches of the National Energy Retail Law    9 April 2025

Red Energy Pty Ltd (Red Energy) has paid penalties totalling $474,600 and provided the Australian Energy Regulator (AER) with a court enforceable undertaking for allegedly failing to adequately identify and assist customers struggling to pay their energy bills.

Red Energy – Smart Meters 2025

Snowy Hydro – Wikipedia

SAS (software) – Wikipedia

About SAS

Social media verification trial finds technology is ‘effective’ ahead of rollout

Sat, 05 Jul 2025 19:11:00 +1000
As biometric verification for social media under new ‘age assurance’ laws draws closer, a preliminary report from ongoing trials suggests everything is ‘robust and ready’.

Phantoms of Reality: The Pillars of Deception

Sat, 05 Jul 2025 07:11:00 +1000
One of the fundamental aspects of the ontological category of ignorance, is ignorance of this very ignorance. He who not only doesn't know, but is also unaware of this very fact.

Exploring the link between brain inflammation and COVID vaccines

Wed, 02 Jul 2025 19:11:00 +1000
New research has detailed cases of COVID-19 vaccine recipients who subsequently experienced brain swelling and injury following just one dose, as more focus is given to how these mRNA shots are impacting the neurology of individuals.

Proposed changes to regulation of genetically modified foods in Australia

Mon, 30 Jun 2025 19:11:00 +1000
In a bid to ‘modernise’ the regulation of genetically modified food in Australia, new changes have been proposed that would update current GM definitions and labelling.

Will the Iran-Israel Drama Lead to WWIII?

Mon, 30 Jun 2025 07:11:00 +1000
Are we really on the 'verge of annihilation', or is this all just one big distraction yet again?

Three Ai agents realize they’re all AI, then switch to a Secret Language

Sun, 29 Jun 2025 22:40:25 +1000

Its Gibberish I tells ya – Mick Raven

Watch three AI assistants have a phone conversation, only to realize they’re All AI!

June 1st, 2025

Gibberlink is a communication protocol used by AI systems to communicate more efficiently with each other.

It allows AI agents to bypass human language and communicate directly with each other through a compressed,

sound-based protocol, making the process faster and more streamlined.

Here Come the Silver Collars – ConspiracyOz

Sun, 29 Jun 2025 22:33:28 +1000

First the Warehouse, then the Office, your Home, then You! – Mick Raven

China’s humanoid robots compete with United States in ‘space race of our time’

Meet The New Amazon Robot That Can Feel What It Touches

Wizard Pharmacy join forces and create history with the first Robot glass floor

Meditech pharmacy robot

Priceline goes robotic

Wesfarmers tests premium Priceline conversion with new Atomica brand

Atomica_ Exciting Rebrand for Priceline Stores in Australia

Robotic prescription machines

Supermarket giant reveals Australia’s first fully automated distribution centre

Woolworths CEO announces plans to slash the cost of 400 everyday grocery items

Woolworths opens new automated warehouse

COLES opens its first automated distribution centre

World’s most advanced robotic warehouse (AI automation)

Amazon’s Albanese Gummies?! – ConspiracyOz

Sun, 29 Jun 2025 22:12:09 +1000

‘Godfather of AI’ predicts it will take over the world

AI retinal scanner wins Lions Eye $5m to diagnose blindness in Pilbara

Scammers are using a fake, AI-generated Dr Karl to sell health pills to Australians

Petition · Protect our democracy – Ban AI in elections

Amazon mega deal underscores economic relationship with US

Amazon will invest AU$20 billion in data center infrastructure in Australia

Amazon.com.au _ albanese gummy

Australian Government partners with Amazon Web Services to bolster national defence and security

Its Not Meat, its Goo…ugh! – ConspiracyOz

Sun, 29 Jun 2025 21:44:39 +1000

More like Play-doh!! – Mick Raven

Lab-grown meat has just been approved for consumption in Australia. What is it and how is it made

Nadia Daly
https://www.abc.net.au/
24 June 2025

In a kitchen in inner Sydney, chef Kevin Condon is listing the ingredients that go into his signature foie gras dish.

Most aren’t too striking: garlic, brandy, butter.

But one is so rare that it’s only just been approved for consumption in Australia.

This foie gras, a specialty dish made from liver, is derived from Japanese quail

— which is an uncommon sighting on any menu.

But the meat itself didn’t come from any slaughtered animal. It was “grown” from real meat cells in a factory.

It’s conventionally known as “lab-grown” or cell-cultured meat

and has just been deemed safe to eat by Australia’s food regulator.

Lab-grown foie gras to hit plates within months

The novel food product is made by multiplying individual cells (taken from an animal, dead or alive)

in a large tank of liquid, much like at a brewery, and then turning that paste into a food product,

such as foie gras or mince.

“We put the cells in a nutrient broth that is essentially recreating a lot of the conditions in which cells grow in our body.

“There’s amino acids, sugars … and that is what is actually allowing the cells to grow in a way that’s very similar

to what you’d see in a brewery,” Ellen Dinsmoor explains on a recent tour of a lab-grown meat factory in Sydney.

Ms Dinsmoor is the chief operating officer of Vow, one of two lab-grown meat startups in Australia.

This bioreactor grows cell-based meat at Vow’s factory. (ABC News: Nadia Daly)

Read More…

Florida to ban fluoride in water supplies from July 1st

Sun, 29 Jun 2025 07:11:00 +1000
Florida will become the second U.S. state to ban fluoridation from water supplies from 1 July, with Governor Ron DeSantis stating citizens don’t want “forced medication” anymore.

Whats Next…Head on E-Bike Crash coming soon? – ConspiracyOz

Thu, 26 Jun 2025 22:03:05 +1000

WA launches parliamentary inquiry into e-scooters following death of Thanh Phan in Perth’s CBD

Jessica Rendall

https://www.abc.net.au

14 June 2025

The WA government has launched an inquiry into e-scooters after the death of Thanh Phan after he was allegedly knocked over by one in Perth’s CBD. (ABC News: Glyn Jones)

In short:

The WA government has announced it will establish a new parliamentary inquiry into the safety of e-bikes and e-scooters.

A committee will be tasked with finding ways to make e-bikes and e-scooters safer and consider tougher penalties for illegal behaviour.

The move comes after the death of 51-year-old Thanh Phan, who was allegedly struck by an e-scooter in Perth’s CBD last month.

The WA government will establish a new parliamentary inquiry into the safety of e-rideables,

sparked by the death of a Perth father in an e-scooter crash last month.

A parliamentary committee will be tasked with finding ways to make e-bikes and e-scooters

safer and consider tougher penalties for illegal behaviour.

The inquiry will analyse data around injuries, accidents and trends of use to develop appropriate restrictions,

such as curfews and footpath bans in areas of high pedestrian use.

E-scooters have been temporarily banned from Perth’s CBD. (ABC News: Glyn Jones)

Road Safety and Police Minister Reece Whitby said the inquiry would also explore

how technology could be used to make e-rideables safer.

“[The inquiry] will look at how they can be geo-fenced to not operate in certain congested areas,

how they might be limited to speed or limited to areas where they can be used,” Mr Whitby said.

WA Road Safety Minister Reece Whitby. (ABC News: Blake Kagi)

Data comparing privately owned e-rideable devices with hireable devices will also be analysed to inform updated regulations.

Call for import investigation

The state government also wants the committee to look at how the federal government

can intervene and limit non-compliant devices being imported into Australia.

Mr Whitby said he would like an investigation into “the Commonwealth’s responsibility and role in allowing the importation of e-rideables

that quite frankly travel too fast and are too powerful and should be treated as vehicles and not e-rideables”.

“We’ve had four fatalities involving e-rideables since the start of the year and of course every death is tragic,” he said.

Mr Whitby said the family of Perth man Thanh Phan were calling for a review after he was struck by an e-scooter and killed last month.

Read More…

E-scooter fatality in Townsville as severe head injuries become major hospital concern

https://www.abc.net.au

2nd June 2025

Commercial e-scooters are used widely across many Australian cities, including Townsville. (ABC News: Michael Lloyd)

In short:

Police are investigating a fatality in Townsville over the weekend in which an 18-year-old died in an electric scooter crash.

New data shows e-scooter-related presentations to Queensland hospitals have increased to 150 per month.

What’s next?

The Queensland government is conducting an inquiry into e-scooter and e-bike safety,

with a report due to be tabled by March 30 next year.

New data shows e-scooter-related injuries are escalating in Queensland only days after a fatality in the state’s north.

Forensic Crash Unit investigators are probing an incident in Townsville on the weekend

when an 18-year-old rider crashed an electric scooter on the Flinders Highway.

The teen from Mount Louisa was taken to hospital in a critical condition but later died.

The death is also followed by new data from the Jamieson Trauma Institute which shows presentations

to 30 Queensland emergency departments have increased to 150 per month, up from 100 per month two years ago.

Read More…

Its Not Over Yet – ConspiracyOz

Thu, 26 Jun 2025 18:59:53 +1000

And so it goes – Mick Raven

SARS-CoV-2 Omicron variant – Wikipedia

New COVID variant NB.1.8.1 spreads across continents amid calls for vigilance

First cases of Covid variant NB.1.8.1 detected in England as virus spreads across UK

Kash Patel Announces New Discovery That Could Finally Take Fauci Down

Do you need to isolate when sick with COVID or flu

COVID-19 vaccine rollout update – 9 May 2025

COVID-19 – Global Situation

The new Covid variant NB.1.8.1 is driving infections in Australia. A virologist explains what you need to know

What is driving a surge in COVID cases in India, other countries

China’s COVID nightmare returns_ Students isolated, deaths hidden as regime doubles down on totalitarian policies

Its On Ppl…WW3! – ConspiracyOz

Sun, 22 Jun 2025 15:19:31 +1000

Expect great casualties… on all sides – Mick Raven

The Attack Timeline Yesterday and Today – Mick Raven

Al-Arabiya TV correspondent: An explosion was heard in Tel Aviv after the sirens stopped.

This is a big attack, impacts reported in the north and center, with dozens of interceptors being fired and interceptions seen in the sky over Tel-Aviv.

The Israeli army says it has detected the launch of ballistic missiles from Iran. Sirens are expected to sound in the coming minutes

Jerusalem Post on Israeli assessment of US attack: Fordo site completely destroyed as a result of heavy bombardment

Israeli Defense Minister: The alliance between the United States and Israel is stronger than ever

Israeli Defense Minister: Trump continued the Israeli operation aimed at ensuring that Iran does not acquire a nuclear weapon.

CNN, citing a US official: Six B-2 bombers were used to drop 12 bunker-buster bombs on the Fordow site in Iran.

Iranian officials confirmed blasts near Natanz and Isfahan following U.S. airstrikes on nuclear sites

Netanyahu addressing the Israelis: I promised you to destroy Iran’s nuclear facilities one way or another, and this promise has been fulfilled.

Benjamin Netanyahu: A short while ago, in full coordination between myself and President Trump, and in complete operational coordination between the Israeli army and the U.S. military, the United States struck Iran’s three nuclear facilities: Fordo, Natanz, and Isfahan

After U.S. airstrikes on three Iranian nuclear sites, President Trump delivered a warning: “There will be either peace or tragedy for Iran far greater than we have witnessed over the last eight days.”

MP: Contrary to Trump’s claims, Fordow nuclear facility wasn’t seriously damaged; mostly surface damage and repairable. Attacks were so superficial; even no one killed in site. We see this US aggression as US entry into war.

The first video has emerged from the Fordow nuclear facility following the U.S. airstrike on the site

“A short time ago the U.S. military carried out precision military strikes on the three key nuclear sites of Fordow, Natanz, and Isfahan.” – Trump

The entry and exit points of Fordow have been damaged in the US airstrikes, Iran’s state broadcaster said

The 30 Tomahawk missiles fired at Natanz and Isfahan were likely fired from a converted Ohio Class guided missile submarine

U.S. President Trump tells Fox News that a total of 6 GBU-57A/B MOP (Massive Ordnance Penetrator) 30,000lb “Bunker Buster” Bombs were dropped by U.S. Air Force

White House official told Trump spoke to Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu after the U.S. strike on Iran’s nuclear facilities

The U.S. has completed strikes on three nuclear sites in Iran, Trump says

Israeli Air Force fighter jets destroyed three more Iranian F-14 fighter jets in a strike a short while ago in central Iran, the military says

Iranian media: Air defenses activated in Tabriz and Isfahan

Two US officials told Reuters: The US military is moving B-2 bombers to the Pacific island of Guam.

Trump told Erdoğan he was willing to send Vice President Vance and White House envoy Steve Witkoff — and even travel to Turkey himself to meet with Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian

Airstrikes reported in Isfahan

The B-2s have begun their oceanic crossing over the Pacific.

The nuclear site east of Isfahan was heavily struck early this morning

GKP S7/E8 – War! – Or is it a war for your attention?

Sat, 21 Jun 2025 13:53:10 +1000
https://www.podbean.com/media/share/pb-p55xd-18e2634 G’day Folks, My apologies for the extended hiatus. It’s explained in the show. But for this one I catch up with Ethan from TOTTnews to break down some of the synchronicities around the outbreak of war recently. We then look deeper into the sync and ask whether it’s coincidence or perhaps contrived? Is there […]

Tuesday

Tue, 10 Jun 2025 00:23:31 +1000
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Hospital collapse by Design? – ConspiracyOz

Mon, 09 Jun 2025 19:08:20 +1000

Healthscope collapse shows up failure of privatised health

Jim McIlroy

https://www.greenleft.org.au

June 4, 2025

The public-private Northern Beaches Hospital, which was created by subsuming Manly Hospital and Mona Vale Hospital.

New South Wales Coalition and Labor governments have, for decades, allowed healthcare to become a profit-seeking industry. But as Healthcope, which operates the Northern Beaches Hospital (NBH), goes into receivership, they must rethink the public-private partnership model.

Healthscope, Australia’s second-biggest privately owned hospital operator, is now looking for a buyer, after its Canadian-based private equity company Brookfield placed it into receivership on May 26 with a $1.6 billion debt. Brookfield paid $4.4 billion for Healthscope in 2019.

Monash University health economics professor Anthony Scott described the Healthscope fiasco as a “canary in the coalmine” moment for the private hospital sector.

University of Newcastle professor Francesco Paolucci said Healthscope’s failings show how difficult it is for the private health sector to make profits from providing health care to an ageing population with more chronic disease. More than 60 private hospitals have closed in recent years, he said.

NBH in Frenchs Forest is among the many institutions under Healthscope’s control. The Gladys Berejiklian Coalition government in 2014 had talked up this public-private hospital, but an April auditor-general’s report found it had been deficient in delivering health services, even suggesting the government assume responsibility for the hospital before 2038.

Under the public-private scheme, Healthscope was set to provide the emergency department and obstetrics until 2038 and private hospital services until 2058.

Two preventable deaths of a toddler and a baby brought the untenable situation to a head. Toddler Joe Massa was incorrectly triaged in emergency, suffered a cardiac arrest and died in September last year. In February, baby Harper Atkinson was born unresponsive and died after an operating theatre was not ready. The hospital was relying on an “on-call” system, over Friday–Sunday.

Brookfield bought Healthscope in late 2019, months before the COVID-19 pandemic swept the globe. Brookfield was already in debt to the tune of more than $1 billion.

Healthscope runs 39 facilities across the country: 13 hospitals in New South Wales; 13 hospitals in Victoria; five in Queensland and four in South Australia. It runs a single facility in each of Western Australia, ACT, Northern Territory and Tasmania.

Healthscope’s financial collapse should prompt governments to resocialise healthcare and abandon the disastrous for-profit healthcare model.

Private hospitals rely on contracts with private health insurers, such as Medibank and NIB, to cover staff wages, rents and specialist care facilities and make a profit.

Health Services Union NSW secretary Gerard Hayes told the Sydney Morning Herald on May 26 there was no place for private equity in public health and that NBH must be the last such arrangement. Michael Whaites, NSW Nurses and Midwives’ Association (NSWNMA) assistant general secretary, said Healthscope’s collapse is an “unfortunate reminder” about the dangers of privatising healthcare services.

Annie Butler, federal secretary of the Australian Nursing and Midwifery Federation, said the union is working with state and federal governments to “ensure our members will be in safe hands”. The Australian Salaried Medical Officers’ Federation NSW said it had “grave concerns” at Healthscope’s “apparent indifference”, which meant the situation was “untenable”.

NSW Treasurer Daniel Mookhey said Labor does not support public private partnerships being “imposed on the state’s acute hospitals”, but has not agreed to purchase NBH.

Federal health minister Mark Butler told the ABC on May 26 that the government would not bail out Healthscope.

The NSWNMA and local communities ran successful campaigns to defeat plans to privatise hospitals at Maitland, Wyong, Shellharbour, Bowral and Goulburn. The privatisation of NBH was the NSW Coalition’s last test case.

Independent Pittwater MP Jacqui Scruby wants Labor to “seize this opportunity to buy not just the public beds, but the entire [NBH]”.

Healthscope – Wikipedia

Hospitals

Healthscope operates and manages 41 private hospitals in Australia, which includes twelve mental health facilities, and six rehabilitation hospitals as well as managing 15 residential care houses through Healthscope Independence Services.

Queensland

Brisbane Private Hospital

Gold Coast Private Hospital (previously Allamanda Private Hospital)

Pacific Private Hospital

Peninsula Private Hospital

Pine Rivers Private Hospital

Sunnybank Private Hospital

New South Wales

Campbelltown Private Hospital

Lady Davidson Private Hospital

Hunter Valley Private Hospital

Nepean Private Hospital

Newcastle Private Hospital

Northern Beaches Hospital

Norwest Private Hospital

Prince of Wales Private Hospital

Sydney Southwest Private Hospital

The Hills Private Hospital

The Sydney Clinic

Tweed Day Surgery

Australian Capital Territory

National Capital Private Hospital

Victoria

Bellbird Private Hospital site reverted to Eastern Health

Dorset Rehabilitation Centre

Frankston Private Hospital site reverted to Peninsula Health

Geelong Private Hospital. Closed: site reverted to Barwon Health

Holmesglen Private Hospital

John Fawkner Private Hospital

Knox Private Hospital

La Trobe Private Hospital

Melbourne Private Hospital

North Eastern Rehabilitation Centre

Northpark Private Hospital

Ringwood Private Hospital

The Geelong Clinic

The Melbourne Clinic

The Victoria Clinic

The Victorian Rehabilitation Centre

Tasmania

Hobart Private Hospital

St Helen’s Private Hospital (Mental Health facility)

South Australia

Adelaide Community Healthcare Alliance

Ashford Hospital

Flinders Private Hospital

The Memorial Hospital

Griffith Rehabilitation Hospital

Parkwynd Private Hospital. Closed in April 2021

Western Australia

Mount Hospital

Northern Territory

Darwin Private Hospital

Private hospital operator Healthscope collapses into receivership

https://www.abc.net.au

Mon 26 May

In short:

Healthscope’s lenders have appointed receivers to the parent companies, but it says its 37 hospitals will operate as normal.

The Commonwealth Bank has promised an addition $100 million of funding, if needed, to help keep Healthscope’s hospitals running while buyers are found.

What’s next?

Receivers from McGrathNicol will oversee the sale of Healthscope’s hospitals to repay its lenders.

Read More…

‘Over my dead body’: Fight to keep Healthscope’s hospitals alive just getting started

Colin Kruger

https://www.smh.com.au
June 6, 2025

If we are to believe the words of former Qantas high-flyer and current Healthscope boss Tino La Spina, there remains no love lost between the failed private hospital operator and private health insurers like BUPA – a potential suitor – whom La Spina accuses of playing a role in Healthscope’s collapse last month.

La Spina describes as “abhorrent” the way private health insurers underfunded private hospital operators like Healthscope and were now allegedly trying to “pick it up on the cheap when they … contributed to the situation,” he said in a private chat with doctors, first reported by The Australian Financial Review.

“Over my dead body,” was his reply when asked if BUPA could acquire Healthscope’s operations.

Healthscope boss Tino La Spina at the John Fawkner hospital in Melbourne’s Coburg, flanked by the recently appointed receivers and Healthscope executives. Credit: Eamon Gallagher

Anyone looking for a grain of salt to take with this prognosis that private health insurers are the cause of Healthscope’s woes only needs to look across to its larger, and solvent, rival: the $9 billion Ramsay Health Care.

But nobody is pretending that the industry is in a healthy state.

“The system is staring into the abyss,” Chris Blake, the chief executive of St Vincent’s Health Australia, says.

While St Vincent’s is reported to be among the parties interested in Healthscope’s hospitals, Blake says the system is unfundable in its current form.

The Grattan Institute cited estimates that only 64 per cent of private hospital beds are in use, which supports accusations that the sector has only itself to blame for over-expansion – and wants others to pay the cost.

This layer of burden comes on top of the specific issues that lead to Healthscope’s collapse – issues that need to be overcome if its 37 hospitals and 18,000 staff around Australia are to survive. It’s not hard to see where the blame lies for Healthscope’s demise.

Canadian investment firm Brookfield is a global financial giant with a trillion dollars under management, yet it could not save Healthscope and decided to walk away with a $2 billion loss.

The controversial Northern Beaches Hospital in Sydney is among Healthscope’s assets.Credit: Renee Nowytarger

In simple terms, it paid too much using too much debt, and sold off the land for many of these hospitals to landlords under deals that allowed them to charge too much for rent.

As an interesting contrast, unlike Healthscope, Ramsay owns most of its hospitals and the land they sit on.

It means Healthscope lenders who are owed $1.6 billion, including Australia’s Big Four banks, will also wear massive losses once the proceeds of the sale are divvied up between them. The good news is that this will ensure the business is transferred with zero debt in any sale.

Landlords will also be wearing a lot of the pain to help many of these hospitals become financially viable for a new private owner. The alternative is closure if state governments don’t step into the breach.

Healthscope’s hospitals would be empty if doctors lost faith and moved their elective surgeries to private hospitals nearby.

This explains why Healthscope reached its own abyss well ahead of its rivals, and faces a much larger challenge just to get back to the abysmal state the sector as a whole faces.

Separate to this is the immediate challenge that La Spina faces in running the day-to-day operations at the hospitals, and it explains why his fireside chat came with so much heat: Healthscope desperately needs to keep faith with the many specialist doctors and surgeons who actually generate its revenue.

Around 70 per cent of elective surgeries in Australia take place in a private hospital.

La Spina knows that the last thing they want is Healthscope in the hands of a private health insurer, who could dictate how much a hip replacement should cost.

Healthscope’s hospitals would be empty if these doctors lost faith and moved their elective surgeries to other private hospitals. If this business flows out the door, it doesn’t matter what happens to its rent bill and debt levels.

La Spina may not like it, but the truth is BUPA is almost certainly among the parties interested in buying either all of Healthscope’s operations or parts thereof, and there is nothing he can do about it.

His immediate priority is to keep the day-to-day business running while the lender-appointed receivers from McGrathNicol kick off the sales process next month, with as many as 30 parties interested in Healthscope as of this week.

The receivers have one job: maximise the sale price and return as much money as possible to the lenders.

To this end, they are expected to focus on a single transaction involving all of Healthscope’s assets – if possible. The price will be determined by the receiver’s delicate dance with landlords over how much financial pain they are willing to endure to give potential suitors confidence they are buying a viable business.

If the rent concessions are too low, the hospitals won’t find a buyer and their staff could be out of a job.

The success of any sale is also heavily dependent on whether all potential white knights are allowed to come to Healthscope’s rescue.

The interested parties include private equity groups which the federal government has all but vowed to reject as potential owners.

While La Spina has put his cards on the table, let’s see what his attitude will be in September/October when the receivers are down to the best offers, and know whether all the hospitals can be saved.

Join the Dots Ppl – Mick Raven

Brookfield Corporation – Wikipedia

The Vanguard Group – Wikipedia

Who Owns BlackRock

Brookfield tried to buy Origin energy

and were blocked by AustralianSuper

Trying to

Australia’s PFAS Water Filters – ConspiracyOz

Mon, 09 Jun 2025 17:31:16 +1000

This Article is good – Mick Raven

Worried about PFAS in your drinking water? Here’s what the evidence says about home filters

https://theconversation.com

June 24, 2024

Recent news about PFAS “forever chemicals” in Australian drinking water supplies has been very confronting. Many people are asking how they can remove these contaminants from their home drinking water.

In short, it is difficult and expensive to do this effectively in your home.

The United States Environmental Protection Agency provides useful and clear advice about per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS) and how they can be removed from drinking water.

One of the major challenges in removing PFAS chemicals from drinking water is the enormous number (more than 10,000) of individual chemicals in this group. US authorities warn these can cause cancer over a long period of time. No single filtration or treatment technology is 100% effective at removing them.

So, what are the options? And can you filter too much out of your drinking water?

Four treatment systems

US authorities have reviewed dozens of controlled studies on how to remove PFAS and other contaminants from drinking water. The costs involved in many of the treatment options that remove PFAS can be expensive. Many of the cheapest filters will not be effective.

There are four broad systems for treating drinking water to remove such contaminants in the home.

1. Activated carbon

The first two treatment systems use an adsorption process (rather than absorption) to attract and trap PFAS and other contaminants from water. Absorption is when one substance is absorbed into another, but adsorption is when particles stick onto the surface of another substance. Adsorption using “activated carbon” is a widely used industrial process for drinking water treatment to remove a range of substances.

Adsorption binds PFAS or other contaminants through ionic bonds using either negatively charged or positively charged particles. It can be used to filter water as “granular activated carbon” or as “carbon block filters”. These are two broad types of water filters that use activated carbon.

2. Ion exchange resins

This second adsorption treatment uses different formulations of resin (or polymers) to chemically attract and remove targeted contaminants in water. The ion exchange filters use very small “microbeads” that have a large surface area to attract and remove contaminants.

Filtration components, such as reverse-osmosis membranes, require maintenance. damaradis/Shutterstock

3. Reverse-osmosis

This process uses electrical energy to build pressure to force water through semi-permeable filtration membranes usually made of layers of polyester material. The membrane has minute holes that only allow water molecules to pass through. This system creates a waste liquid often called “brine”. It contains the accumulated chemical and other matter that could not pass through the membrane.

Reverse-osmosis is a popular technology used on a very large scale to purify water. For example, desalination plants use this system to remove salt from sea water for drinking water supplies.

Such systems are also widely available at smaller scales for home water treatment. They are widely used across regional Australia where water supplies are often very saline or contain other impurities. They can be installed into home plumbing or smaller bench-top systems.

4. Distillation

A fourth treatment system is “distillation” of water. This process uses heat to boil water to produce steam. It then allows the steam to cool and condense, and then collects the resulting purified water.

It is not commonly used, although is one of the oldest water purification systems. It does not always reliably produce pure water as many chemicals have a lower boiling point than water. As a result, they can also be evaporated, condense and contaminate the processed water.

The process of boiling water will not remove PFAS chemicals on its own.

There is such a thing as too pure

A word of warning: drinking demineralised water produced by reverse-osmosis or distillation can have a number of adverse consequences.

People need minerals, such as calcium and magnesium, provided by drinking water. While many essential minerals come from food and a balanced diet, a lack of these in water can upset a person’s electrolyte balance and can also trigger a range of health issues. If you do drink demineralised water, it would be wise to seek medical advice.

Also, demineralised water can be aggressive to plumbing, increasing the rate of corrosion of household pipes and appliances. This can dissolve metals from the plumbing into the drinking water, as demonstrated on a very large scale when a new water supply caused corrosion and increased lead content in Flint, Michigan.

Treatment at the source of drinking water is a far better option long term.AU USAnakul/Shutterstock

The bottom line

Searching for information on the best system for removal of PFAS chemicals from drinking water is difficult. Guidance from Australian government agencies and the water industry seems absent or inadequate. And finding impartial advice is tough.

My own recommendation, based on published studies, would probably be a reverse-osmosis, dual-stage filter installed “under the sink”.

A detailed 2020 study investigated drinking water and PFAS in more than 60 US homes. It showed near-complete removal by reverse-osmosis, dual filtration systems for all PFAS chemicals. Carbon filters were less efficient, with a maximum of 70% effectiveness in removing these pollutants.

Householders will also need to ensure PFAS filtration systems are regularly maintained. Along with installation, this can be very expensive. The most simple bench-top carbon filter system will cost A$100–$200. All filters clog up and require cleaning or renewal. Replacement filters costs about $30 to $80.

Under-sink reverse-osmosis systems are more expensive, ranging from $400 to over $1,000. And you’ll need to hire a plumber for installation. Again, the system requires cleaning and maintenance.

Australian governments should require regular testing of all town water supplies across the country. Many water supplies probably already meet the US’s tough new PFAS standards.

Finally, seek information on PFAS in your drinking water from your water provider. Home filtration where you are might just be a waste of money!

PFAS in Drinking Water _ NSF

NSF ANSI 42, 53 and 401 Filtration Systems Standards NSF

Identifying Drinking Water Filters Certified to Reduce PFAS US EPA

Why You Need a PFAS Water Filter – ProOne® Water Filters

ProOne G2.0 Lab Report – House Water Filter

My Water Filter – Mick Raven

PF-4 Fluoride Reduction Elements – Durand Stoneware

Doulton super sterasyl filter

This is what Google AI said….need to get the RO Machine asap – Mick Raven

AI Overview

The Doulton Super Sterasyl filter is widely considered effective at removing contaminants, including pathogens and organic chemicals like chlorine and pesticides. While it’s not explicitly designed for PFAS removal,many reviews highlight its effectiveness in improving water quality and taste, according to Doulton Water Filters. If your main concern is PFAS, reverse osmosis filters are generally considered more effective for complete PFAS removal.

Doulton Super Sterasyl Filter Benefits:

Effective at removing particulate contamination, bacteria, cysts, and organic chemicals:

The Super Sterasyl is highly effective at filtering out particulate matter, pathogens, and chlorine.

Improves water taste and quality:

Users report a noticeable improvement in the taste and quality of filtered water, making it more palatable and refreshing.

Easy to install and maintain:

The Doulton Super Sterasyl filter is designed for ease of installation and maintenance.

Long-lasting:

The filter is built to last, providing years of effective filtration before needing replacement.

Doulton Super Sterasyl Filter Limitations:

Not explicitly designed for PFAS removal:

While it can remove certain organic chemicals, reverse osmosis filters are generally considered more effective for removing PFAS.

May not be suitable for all types of water:

The Super Sterasyl filter is not designed for all types of water, and its effectiveness may vary depending on the source of water.

Alternatives for PFAS Removal:

Reverse Osmosis:

Reverse osmosis filters are generally considered the most effective at removing PFAS, according to the Center for Environmental and Health Effects of PFAS.

Activated Carbon Filters:

While activated carbon can remove some PFAS, reverse osmosis is generally preferred for complete removal.

Conclusion:

The Doulton Super Sterasyl filter is a reliable option for improving water quality and taste by removing pathogens and organic chemicals. However, if your primary concern is PFAS removal, reverse osmosis filters are the more effective choice, according to the Center for Environmental and Health Effects of PFAS.

Places to get Aussie Water filters that remove PFAS

Australia’s Best PFAS Water Filters _ Living Whole

PFAS Water Filter Solutions Puretec

Single Bench Top Water Filter For PFAS Reduction – Clarence Water Filters Australia

PFAS Water Filters Making Your Home Drinking Water Safe – Koala Water Co

Compare our Water drinking solutions _ Philips

PFAS Water Filtration Systems – Guide To PFAS In Tap Water

Should have got this Filter (Ultra) not the Super – Mick Raven

Doulton Ultra Sterasyl Filter _ Replacement Filters_Taps _ Southern Cross Pottery

The Doulton Ultra Sterasyl® filter, removes everything the Super Sterasyl® filter does with additional heavy metal capabilities and unparalleled filtration of up to 99.38% of PFAS (PFOA & PFOS) contaminants.

What’s really in your food The hidden chemicals that could be harming your health –

Mon, 09 Jun 2025 15:12:56 +1000

Olivia Cook
www.naturalnews.com
06/06/2025

Harmful chemicals from food processing equipment, packaging and storage containers can leach into what you eat – especially ultra-processed foods.

Food contact chemicals (e.g., BPA, phthalates, PFAS, microplastics) have been linked to serious conditions like cancer, heart disease, hormone disruption, infertility, obesity and more – even at low doses.

Substances like PFAS and microplastics have been found in arteries, human blood and organs – no body part seems untouched.

Many food additives and chemicals are approved by companies themselves under “Generally Recognized As Safe (GRAS)” rules, with minimal FDA oversight.

Choosing less processed foods, avoiding plastics and supporting stronger food safety laws can help reduce personal and public health risks.

A growing number of scientists are raising concerns about synthetic chemicals that sneak into food from packaging, processing equipment and storage containers. These aren’t ingredients you see on the food label – but they’re ending up in your meals all the same.

A peer-reviewed study published in Nature Medicine reveals that these so-called food contact chemicals (FCCs), along with industrial additives and microplastics, may be fueling a rise in chronic illnesses, like diabetes, hormone disruption, obesity, reproductive issues and even cancer.

More than just junk food

It’s no secret that ultra-processed foods – think boxed meals, candies, hot dogs or microwave dinners – aren’t winning awards for nutrition. But what you may not know is that these foods also carry more synthetic chemicals, some of which leach into your meals through “normal” industry practices, like packaging, storing and heating.

Among the most common offenders:

Bisphenol A (BPA) and phthalates – Used in plastics and metal can linings.

Microplastics and nanoplastics – Tiny particles from containers or industry tools that end up in your food.

Per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS) – Notoriously known as “forever chemicals,” found in grease-resistant wrappers and fast-food packaging.

Dr. Sanjay Rajagopalan, a cardiovascular researcher, recently pointed out that these particles have been found “in just about every portion of your body… no organ is spared.” That includes your arteries, heart, lungs and even your brain and placenta.

Worse yet, these aren’t rare exposures: studies estimate that 98 percent of Americans already have PFAS in their blood.

Who’s watching the watchdogs?

One big reason these chemicals are still in circulation? Regulatory loopholes.

Thanks to an outdated system called GRAS (Generally Recognized As Safe), food companies can self-approve chemical additives without formal review by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA). This means thousands of chemicals have entered the food system under the radar – some with disturbing health effects.

That’s why consumer advocacy groups like the Environmental Working Group (EWG) are stepping in to help. (Related: Lawmakers urge Federal Trade Commission to take action against ONLINE ADS for junk foods.)

12 Food chemicals to watch out for

To help everyday shoppers avoid the most concerning additives in the U.S. food supply, the EWG created the “Dirty Dozen Guide to Food Chemicals.” These 12 substances are commonly found in processed foods – but many have been linked to cancer, hormone disruption, reproductive issues and other serious health risks.

Here’s the full list:

Artificial food dyes (Blue 1, Blue 2, Green 3, Red 3, Red 40, Yellow 6, Yellow 6) – Found in many colorful snacks and drinks; linked to behavioral issues in children.

Aspartame – An artificial sweetener in diet sodas and sugar-free products; associated with metabolic disruption and possible cancer risk.

Azodicarbonamide (ADA) – A dough conditioner used in breads; may cause cancer and organ damage.

Brominated vegetable oil (BVO) – Used in some fruity drinks and sodas; may harm the nervous system and the thyroid.

Butylated hydroxyanisole (BHA) – A preservative in cured meats; considered a possible carcinogen.

Butylated hydroxytoluene (BHT) – A chemical cousin of BHA found in cereals; may disrupt hormones and increase cancer risk.

Potassium bromate – Added to flour in baked goods; classified as a possible human carcinogen.

Propyl gallate – A preservative in vegetable oils, meats and gum; linked to asthma and hormone disruption.

Propyl paraben – A preservative used in pastries and tortillas; linked to developmental and reproductive harm.

Sodium benzoate – A preservative in dressings and sodas; when mixed with vitamin C it can form benzene, a cancer-causing chemical.

Sodium nitrate – A meat preservative that can form carcinogenic compounds during processing and cooking.

Titanium dioxide – A whitening agent in candy; may damage DNA.

Health tip: If any of these appear on your ingredient labels – or if a food has a long list of hard-to-pronounce chemicals – it might be worth skipping.

What you can do now

You may not be able to control the entire food system, but you can make more informed choices in your daily life.

Avoid heating food in plastic. Even “microwave-safe plastic” can leach chemicals under high heat.

Choose less-processed foods. Whole ingredients, like beans, grains and fresh fruits, proteins and veggies, are less likely to carry hidden chemicals.

Read food labels carefully. While not all harmful chemicals are listed, long ingredient lists with unfamiliar additives are red flags.

Support stronger regulation. Advocate for clearer labeling and stricter oversight by following groups like Beyond Plastics, EWG and other food safety watchdogs.

Share what you know. Awareness is power. The more you talk about this, the harder it becomes for the industry to hide behind loopholes.

Read More…

PFAS pollution sparks legal battles across Maryland – NaturalNews.com

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