If ever there was a blatant statement of realpolitik masquerading as friendliness, the latest US-Pacific Island declaration must count as one of them. The Biden administration has been busy of late, wooing Pacific Island states in an effort to discourage increasingly sharp tilt towards China. It has been spurred on, in no small way, by Beijing’s failure in May to forge a trade and security pact with Pacific Island countries. (more…)
Binoy Kampmark
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The rise of Trussonomics
It’s impossible to know whether the new British Prime Minister is genuinely serious about constructive policy or not. She is certainly interested in greasing palms and calming the storms, if only to delay the inevitable. Having proven herself the shallowest of candidates to succeed her disgraced, not wholly banished predecessor, Liz Truss has leapt into economic policy as her starting point. (more…)
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A “backstab”: Santos, drilling and First Nations Peoples
Federal Court Justice Mordecai Bromberg has been in the environmental news again, this time throwing a large judicial spanner in the works of Santos and its drilling efforts in the Timor Sea. (more…)
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Whitewashing at Shinzo Abe’s state funeral
Be careful who you praise and the degree of zeal you do it with. The slain Shinzo Abe, shot dead in Nara on July 8, towered over Japanese politics. In doing so, he cast a lengthy shadow. In death, this shadow continues to grow ever more darkly. (more…)
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“I do not think, I know”: Scott Morrison’s submarine deception
When it was revealed that former Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison had not only shown contempt for his own government in secretly appointing himself, via the Governor-General’s approval, to five portfolios, the depths of deception seemed to be boundless. His tenure had already been marked by a spectacular, habitual tendency to conceal matters. What else would come out? (more…)
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Charles III, the billionaire and owner of the Oval cricket ground
Once the fixated adoration with the late Queen Elizabeth II starts cooling, the accountants of public welfare and decency will be stunned to realise the costs and wealth associated with the royal institution. Her successor, Charles III, is continuing in that vein, a jarring note of wealth and pomp even as prices rise and the hefty bills for citizens (should we say subjects?), bite. (more…)
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Queenly saturation
Turn on the television. Move to the screen. Switch on the device – if you ever left it off. Queen Elizabeth II may have passed, but she is everywhere in very lively fashion, a spectral manifestation that has utterly controlled large chunks of a transfixed global media system. (more…)
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The other side of Elizabeth II’s reign: How to profit from plunder while disclaiming responsibility
Reactions to the death of Queen Elizabeth II from victims of atrocities during her reign were less than warm. Did the British Crown derive profits of plunder yet disclaim responsibility for colonisation, they asked? The Westminster shroud, in this regard, is thick indeed, a layer of forced exculpation.
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Dunderheaded diplomacy: Australia’s funding offer to the Solomon Islands
What is it about Australian diplomacy that makes it so clumsy and dunderheaded? Is it the harsh delivery, the tactless expression, or the inability to do things with subtle reflection? On September 6, Australian diplomacy gave another display of such form with Foreign Minister Penny Wong’s remarks about the Solomon Islands elections. (more…)
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Beggars in surplus: Australia’s university gangsters
With the election of a new government in Australia in May, the begging bowls were being readied by administrators in the university sector. Bloated, ungainly, ruthless and uneven in quality, the country’s universities, for the most part, had inadvertently made their case for more public funding harder. (more…)
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It’s all political: Julian Assange appeals his extradition
Julian Assange’s legal team has taken its next step along their Via Dolorosa, filing an appeal against the decision to extradite their client to the United States to face 18 charges, 17 based on the odious US Espionage Act of 1917. (more…)
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Canberra is a fashioned spear for the US against China.
There is an overwhelming boisterous ignorance that characterises Australia’s foreign policy approach to China. (more…)
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The many lives of Ayman al-Zawahiri
Ayman al-Zawahiri is dead – or so we are told. Al-Qaida’s chief and successor to the slain Osama bin Laden, he was deemed the chief ideologue and mastermind behind the audacious September 11, 2001 attacks on the United States. On July 31, he was supposedly killed in a drone strike in Afghanistan’s capital, Kabul, while standing on his balcony. (more…)
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Opaque matters in the Pacific: Fiji’s maritime essential services centre
With China constantly being accused of insufferable secrecy and a lack of openness about security and defence arrangements among partners in the Pacific, the shoe, when on the other foot, sits just as well. In the case of Australia, it is particularly snug. (more…)
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Stumbling Surveillance: The end of the COVIDSafe App
It took a few years of tolerable incompetence, caused fears about security, and was meant to be the great surveillance salvation to reassure us all. Instead, Australia’s COVIDSafe App only identified two positive cases of infection during the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic, and failed, in every sense of the term, to work. (more…)
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The failings of Westminster: Scott Morrison’s Shadow Government
Why the sharp intake of breath, the tingling shock? (more…)
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Chegg, cheating and Australian Universities
The note on Radio National’s Background Briefing on the morning of July 31 was sombre. A student, who did not divulge his real name (he is professionally pseudonymised as Ramesh), talks about services that aid him in his study. Aid is less accurate than do – given that he is working gruelling night shifts in the fast-food industry, he is incapable of making morning classes at the said unnamed university. Flipping burgers in greasy splendour takes precedent. (more…)
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Facial recognition technology down under
The language is far from reassuring. Despite being caught red handed using facial recognition technology unbeknownst to customers, a number of Australia’s large retail companies have given a meek assurance that they will “pause” their use. The naughty will only show contrition in the most qualified of ways. (more…)
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Gilding the cage of suburbia: farewelling Neighbours
The statistics of Australia’s longest running drama series about sickeningly idyllic suburbia will interest soap show boffins. It lasted 5,955 episodes over 37 seasons, starting in 1985. (more…)
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Penal assassination: The gradual effort to kill Assange
They really do want to kill him. Perhaps it is high time that his detractors and sceptics, proven wrong essentially from the outset, admit that the US imperium, along with its client states, is willing to see Julian Assange perish in prison. (more…)
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Scott Morrison awaits the apocalypse
The minds of defeated prime ministers are rarely pretty. In some cases, they are damnably awful places, where ruins accumulate and dust gathers in wretchedness. (more…)
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International accountability: Myanmar, the ICJ and the genocide question
The indomitable spirit of Raphael Lemkin, bibliophile, assiduous documenter of humanity’s dark deeds and inexecrable conduct, is bound to be an unsettled one. (more…)
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Customary barbarity: Britain’s SAS in Afghanistan
The insistence that there is a noble way of fighting war, one less bloody and brutal, has always been the hallmark of forces self-described as civilised. Restraint characterises their behaviour; codes of laws follow in their wake, rather than genocidal impulses. Killing, in short, is a highly regulated, disciplined affair. (more…)
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Terms of condescension: The language of Australia’s “Pacific Family”
When will this nonsense on familial connection between Australia and the Pacific end? In 2018, Australia’s then Pentecostal Prime Minister, Scott Morrison, drew upon a term that his predecessors had not. On November 8 that year, he announced that Australia’s engagement with the region would be taken to another level, launching a “new chapter in relations with our Pacific family.” (more…)
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The brutality of “Bulldozer Justice” in India
It looks all too eerily similar as a method: the expulsion of individuals from their home, the demolition of said home and the punishing of entire families. All excused by a harsh reading of local regulations. But this method, used by Israeli authorities for years against vulnerable Palestinians, has become a weapon of choice for the Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party in Uttar Pradesh, Madhya Pradesh, and Gujarat. (more…)
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Convenient omissions: The Ukraine-EU candidacy show
Instances of sympathy are rarely excuses to throw out the rule book. In the case of the European Union, throwing out the rule book about admission has tended to be a feature of enlargement. Credentials of candidate states have been, when needed, boosted or cooked for the occasion. Others, whatever the progress, have been ignored. For a collective that really ought to tidy the stables before admitting more occupants, the enthusiastic glee with which Ukraine’s symbolic candidacy has greeted stayed true to form. (more…)
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Deadly games: The labour casualties of Qatar’s World Cup
A sordid enterprise, nasty, crude and needless. But the World Cup 2022 will be, should anyone bother watching it, stained by one of the highest casualty rates amongst workers in its history, marked by corruption and stained by a pharisee quality. The sportswashers, cleaning agent at the ready, will be out in force, and the hypocrites dressed to the nines. (more…)
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Binoy Kampmark: Julian Assange in Ithaka
“Keep Ithaka always in your mind. Arriving there is where you’re destined for”. P. Cavafy, trans. Edmund Keeley (more…)
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A Spanish court calls: Mike Pompeo, we want you
On June 3, Judge Santiago Pedraz of Spain’s national court, the Audienca Nacional, issued a summons for former CIA director and US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo to testify in an ongoing investigation into the conduct of private security firm UC Global and its founder, David Morales. (more…)
