Brian Toohey

Thanks to Anthony Albanese’s prolonged refusal to change the Morrison government’s damaging policies that he has endorsed, Labor is struggling to stay around 30% in the opinion polls for the next election. One upshot is the latest OECD figures show low and middle income workers in Australia had the highest increase in personal income taxes in the developed world in 2023. The increase for singles below $67,000 (about 2/3 of average income) was was 17% higher than in 2022. Little wonder many voters complain about the cost of living. The Sydney Morning Herald’s Shane Wright points out that those on 167% of average earnings –around $166,000 –only suffered a 0.1% increase. (more…)

A highly regarded commentator on national security, Paul Dibb, has written an astonishing article in the Australian Strategic Policy Institute’s The Strategist on January 15 – astonishing because it is riddled with major errors. (more…)

With some honourable exceptions, most of the media and the parliament enthusiastically support almost everything the Director General of the Australian Security Intelligence Organisation Mike Burgess has to say. Although Burgess is not an extreme hardliner in the Australian intelligence world, many of his statements should not go unchallenged. (more…)

The Australian Secret Intelligence Service was established in 1950 to conduct spying overseas and morally repulsive covert operations. It had a slow start, but in the 1970s it sent three staff to Chile to help the CIA overthrow the democratically elected government of President Salvador Allende. (more…)

Although ASIO dropped the intercept on Labor’s former national secretary David Combe’s phone after alleged KGB officer Valeriy Ivanov left Australia, Prime Minister Bob “Hawke’s interest in what had already transpired, increased dramatically”. Hawke suddenly asked to listen to the Combe-Ivanov tapes. After Hawke had listened for an hour and a half, “The Prime Minister believed that Bushfowl [the codename for the ASIO operation] showed a much closer involvement of Brian Toohey with Ivanov via EPIC [Combe] than recognised before”…. (more…)

The mainstream media has once more tried to generate alarm about the presence of two relatively innocuous Chinese electronic spy ships in international waters during the latest biennial Talisman Sabre military exercise spread across the Australian mainland and offshore oceans. It involves 30,000 troops from 13 countries. Although the Indian prime minister Narendra Modi had publicly assured his Australian counterpart Anthony Albanese that his country would attend, India did not turn up. (more…)

A White House fact sheet released as part of publicity for Australia’s decision to spend almost $400 billion on nuclear submarines is false. It claims, “For over 60 years, the UK and the US have operated more than 500 naval nuclear reactors . . . without incident or adverse effect on human health or the quality of the environment.” In fact, as discussed below, two US nuclear submarines sunk during that period with the loss of all lives on board—a loss most people would consider to have had a “serious effect on human health”. (more…)