Archives: Letters to the Editor

Anthony Albanese’s panegyric on Gough Whitlam identifies many of the Whitlam Government’s achievements. But if it is an attempt to paint an image of his own government as fitting the visionary Whitlam mould, it does the opposite, because it reminds us of the stark policy differences which amount to a rejection by the Albanese Government of all that Whitlam stood for.

Where Whitlam broke the shackles of imperial control, ploughed resources into public education, the creation of universal healthcare and other major social reforms, and sought to create an independent and more egalitarian Australia, the Albanese Government seeks to entrench opposition or downgrading of those initiatives.

On 11 November, Classified Australia noted that at the time of his death in 2024 John Pilger was working on “a studied comparison between the actions and attitudes toward American dominance of the Labor Governments of Gough Whitlam and Anthony Albanese”.

Pilger had concluded that “Gough Whitlam was a giant, a maverick. Albo is a political flea, an unprincipled flea at that, who represents the ‘rollback’ times begun by Reagan and Thatcher. He is a Thatcher, a Blair, a Bush, a Morrison, all in one”.

I don’t know if others have noticed that every time Mike Burgess appears in public, which is a rapidly growing and unpleasant phenomenon, his nose appears to be getting bigger. Like his puppet master Scott Morrison, his propensity for calumny, exaggeration and outright fabrication of threats that only ASIO can discover and eliminate is rampant.

He can of course get away with it as the leader of an organisation that has no oversight of the truth or otherwise of what it says. He regularly fails to produce a jot of evidence for his claims that would stand any chance in a court of law. That has led to allegations by him and the removal of people from our country without any of the supposed evidence that he allegedly has being subjected to testing in a court of law.

The excuse for not doing so is a get out of jail free card for Burgess. He simply claims national security to avoid producing anything substantive. I bet our politicians envy him his capacity to make serious allegations without anyone ever being able to test them!

I agree that Zohran Mamdani’s victory has brought hope, not just to the Gazans but to all who have grown appalled by the apparent inability of our current crop of leaders to address the underlying issue of inequality.

I suspect that this victory in New York City was aided by social media, and as a consequence I foresee a concerted effort to bring that avenue of public discourse under greater control.

I feel the hope this article mentions has to be tempered by two considerations. The first is, what now? Consider the dog who, having chased the car, catches it. The chase was fun, the catch even more so, but what now?

The second consideration is the example of yes-we-can/but-we-won’t Barack Obama. He too came out of seemingly nowhere, inspired great hope and then failed. Mamdani was not born in the US so a run at the presidency is not an option. That frees him to concentrate on NYC. I wish Mamdani well, and I hope the alternative media remains vibrant and free.

Our national inability, cultured in us by Great Britain and the US, to bell the cat of our continued infantile need for mummy or daddy to tell us what to think and do, remains.

If what happened to us in 1975 happened in a country we had been taught to hate or fear, we would have called if what it was – a coup!!

But to acknowledge that happened in Australia would challenge our childish need for mummy or daddy to tell us what just happened.

It relieves us of need to make a decision for ourselves. We remain in political nappies.

Curiously, I see only Chinese text when the Vic bail ads come up while watching BBC or other English language programs on SBS. Not Arabic.

This is presumably because my SBS individual profile indicates I view many Chinese language programs on SBS. So I suspect the author’s experience is likely a matter of individual viewer profiling by SBS, not collective racial profiling.

Perhaps the author should seek confirmation or denial (and correction if appropriate)?

The RSL has for over a hundred years been an organisation committed to a white king and country. it continues to reflect the fantasy of the medieval British values of a brutal, but long dead, racist empire.

It’s no surprise that it continues to promote the delusion of white supremacy over the “yellow peril” when the world has moved on and China is now the peaceful but immensely powerful emerging hegemon.

Apparently, they still need the confected enemy to continue to scare the public s***less so they happily continue to fund a military to re-fight the Second World War!

Your article was very interesting and well-written but please do not use pictures of gavels in articles about our courts. There is not a court in Australia where any judge or magistrate uses a gavel.

It is an Americanism which tends to show how much those who use it do not know about Australian courts and it misleads the public. Try a wig, the scales of justice or anything but do not make our judges and magistrates look like auctioneers.

Thanks John for your article. Just heard Paul Kelly on ABC’s Conversations airbrush the possibility of any CIA involvement in the last 20 seconds of the program… seems a lot of wilful fear of public examination of the claims even at 50 years!

Geoff Raby suggests in his interesting and informative article that Albanese has been “adroit” in his “diplomatic positioning of Australia with both the Trump administration and China’s leaders”, while Australia’s defence and foreign ministers “appear to be both out of step and out of time”.

This assessment deserves more detailed clarification and explanation on the points of difference between Albanese, Wong and Marles.

Where are the signs of tension or disagreement, given the strong evidence of unity re AUKUS, US bases, massive funding of the US military, special deals on mineral resources, closer relations with the UK, NATO, EU, support for genocide, and effective downgrading of connection with Asian neighbours?

I hope Raby can elaborate on his assessment.

What can be done about the “Conclave of the Pernicious”? COPs have been increasingly co-opted by fossil fuel companies, their apologists, and those who are unapologetic. The big four — US, China, Russia and India — who could make a huge contribution if they cared to, are absent. Though it must be said that China, the world’s biggest emitter of greenhouse gases, also leads the world on renewable energy, installing more wind turbines and solar panels last year than the rest of the world combined.

Australia believes it has good credentials, even as we continue to cave to those same fossil fuel interests. We are in danger of succumbing to the hype, misinformation, greenwashing and manufactured anxiety about “living standards” falling due to the energy transition and denying what is on the horizon.

Most of the damage wrought by global heating, as reported in The Lancet, is not occurring in wealthy nations yet (though they have not been totally immune from “unprecedented” weather events). Perhaps the reality (and costs) of climate change has to impinge on the daily lives of the affluent so that anxiety about the stockmarket will be replaced by a more urgent attention to our existential crisis.

Jon Stanford makes a good case for Gough Whitllam. But I disagree with his view on Whitlam’s sacking of ASIS head Bill Robertson in 1975. Whitlam had to ask Robertson twice to shut down ASIS work for the CIA in Chile seeking to install the murderous General Pinochet by destabilisation. (A future female Chilean government member had to escape here).

Then in 1975 Foreign Minister Don Willesee had not been briefed that ASIS was running a spy in East Timor. Whitlam had every right to be angry. It was this sacking, not the petroleum nationalisation loans affair that Malcolm Fraser in November cited as his reason for backing John Kerr.

Robertson’s case may have had a parallel in the issue between South Australian premier Don Dunstan and police chief Harold Salisbury. Salisbury apparently believed he answered to a higher authority than the elected government. Vice-regal, royal, judicial (and MI6 and CIA) links may have persuaded Robertson likewise.

We have to remember that in 50 years, nothing concrete has been done to ensure a government with the confidence of the Lower House cannot be ousted by the unelected governor-general – though in 1977 the US Government assured Gough it wouldn’t interfere again.

Many thanks for the great analysis by Brian Toohey regarding the US imperial project in Australia. The article is revelatory about the sheer reach of US intelligence gathering in this country, not just in its power over Australian control of its foreign policy settings but the US assumptions about how far it could intrude with impunity into our politics process.

We have always connived in keeping a dependency relationship in place. It is no wonder the US has been able to take for granted our mirroring of US military interventions, not for a moment needing to doubt our automatic adherence to security fantasies like ANZUS. Kissinger’s assumptions about our willing colonial status and his prerogatives in punishing errant states represent the reality of the Nixon doctrine – world policeman as bastard cop, using Australia’s sense of distance and isolation to enhance an inferiority complex.

Toohey has been synonymous with the best traditions of investigative journalism for decades and his characteristically excellent article reminds us how, 50 years on, the depressing fact remains that our bunyip establishment still can’t apply Whitlam-style independence of mind to our foreign policy out of fear of our great and powerful friend tearing up our life insurance.

The likelihood of Australia doing the right thing and setting up its own Gaza Tribunal is next to zero. Our mainstream parties are so s**t scared of the Israeli lobby that their moral consciences have been placed in a safe for removal only when easier and more congenial issues can be confected.

Any Australian politician who seeks to tell you we are moral leaders when it comes to the holocaust of the 21st century is either mentally unstable or lying. We are, in fact, morally absent without leave!

“Upon my tongues continual slanders ride, The which in every language I pronounce, Stuffing the ears of men with false reports.” Shakespeare, Henry IV

Jeffrey Sachs has been extraordinarily successful in making us aware of the continuous and deliberate torture of the English language by the US political leadership in pursuit of its centuries long desire to rule the world. Like Humpty Dumpty, they have misused language to that end.

They inherited that damnable propensity from the British who finessed the art in their rule of a globe spanning empire by dividing humanity at every turn.

A stomach-turning example given by Sachs was the declaration by the farcical recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize Barack Obama that the Third World country of Venezuela constituted an “unusual and extraordinary threat” to US national security. This poor Third World country, thousands of kilometres from the US, with the largest oil reserves on the planet, which the US intends to take, is somehow a threat to the most powerful country on the planet. Voltaire was right when he reflected that a person “who is entitled to make you absurd is entitled to make you unjust.” Amen to that!

As we rapidly approach the point at which the dying West will actually fall off the cliff it has been constructing for itself for the last 30 years, we see the usual accompaniments of empire death.

Frantic efforts to convince ourselves that our lashing out in all directions is actually evidence of our continued grasp of the levers of power, finding increasing numbers of relatively powerless others who we can identify as threatening our glorious civilisation and the election of increasingly unhinged leaders who reflect that civilisational decline.

The most obvious of those signs is our belief that increasingly complicated and expensive weapons of war will save us from that historical inevitability. Our politicians identify with the merchants of death as it reflects their infantile cowboy movie beliefs that the bloke with the biggest gun will always win, whilst being confronted with the accumulating evidence that such a scenario no longer applies in a more complex multi-polar world.

The question is, I guess, whether our system of governance has the capacity to produce mature, thoughtful, intelligent and cautious leaders who might change the outcome. On current experience, that seems extraordinarily unlikely!

Tony Abbott is a man displaced in time and place. His approach to the world derives from an 18th century Great Britain imperialism and colonialism of the white Caucasian superior being category. He would have fitted perfectly into the feudal and monarchical fabric of that time as a loyal example of the courtier dedicated to serving his monarch in the lively expectation of honours to be bestowed for faithful service to unaccountable power.

Abbott must find life in the 21st century wholly unattractive in its inclination to see pomp and circumstance as retrograde and its propensity to strip away the false narratives in which barbarism was clothed by those he admires.

In reading any history written by Abbott it is necessary for the reader to be able to distinguish between courtier-like embellishments of the criminality of empire and the truth.

Abbott has always had difficulty in distinguishing between the two!

Professor Andrew Podger certainly had an interesting visit to China and his wide ranging report is appreciated but did he draw the right conclusions? He noted the “strengthening of authoritarian control”, “notwithstanding improvements in public services”.

He goes on to note strengthened party control, the famous China firewall, ubiquitous face-recognition cameras; then comments, “And yet, the forums I attended reveal… continued effort to improve services to the public and their efficiency.” How can this be? Maybe, just maybe, there has been an ‘authoritarian dictat’ to improve services to the public!

Unthinkable.

The unqualified statement, “The overall (Chinese) model impinges on human rights in way we should never accept” by someone who has written extensively about the Robodebt scandal has a strange feel; could Robodebt have happened in China? How would it have been resolved? We are still waiting!

There are references to China encouraging “other countries to follow its authoritarian approach”, “to displace democratisation reforms in the Global South” but no details as to the countries involved.

Maybe it is us that could learn from China to improve public administration here and reduce the circumstances when “we must disagree”.

Just when it seemed most everything had been said and all insights revealed about the events of 11 November 1975, along comes a most illuminating podcast on the crisis. I eagerly await Part Three of the outstanding ‘Pearlcast’ (extra kudos for the charming name) on the Dismissal, which should be compulsory listening for everyone interested in our past and future politics.

I’d long wondered whether the prime minister was told what was overheard from the Lynch/Fraser whispers about what was in store the next day and, if so, what Whitlam made of the remarks. The specific naming of the Lib senators about to break ranks and the likely timeline that would have broken the impasse are likewise dealt with in fascinating detail.

Five senators were going to walk? Then what was in prospect was not just the decisive collapse of Fraser’s strategy but — conceivably — his continued hold on the Opposition leadership. Finally, thank you to John Menadue for convincing me, after 50 years of not buying the foreign intelligence interference angle, that US and British spookery were indeed crucial in dialling up a febrile atmosphere to meltdown and — crucially — convincing Kerr that he could get away with it.

“Respect men like him“?

We haven’t forgotten the Australia Day barbecue stopper of 2015.

John Menadue’s article “The Dismissal, the role of the CIA, MI6 and Austral Americans” provides strong evidence of US hostility towards the Whitlam Government and efforts to undermine it.

Unfortunately, its own credibility is undermined by claiming that “In the Cold War, the US/CIA attempted to overthrow 72 foreign governments” . This appears based on an 2018 article by Lindsay O’Rourke that listed 72 overt or covert operations of all kinds, including support for anti-communist parties or dissidents that can hardly be called attempts to overthrow governments. Plus hazy plans that were never implemented.

An accurate figure is about 29 – not 72. O’Rourke even lists the UN-mandated action to repel the criminal North Korean invasion of the South in 1950, and itemises support for dissidents in Ukraine, Belarus and the Baltic States as somehow separate from the USSR. Support for dissidents against other Eastern European communist regimes imposed by the Soviets was hardly egregious. Many actions were to support existing Western governments, back sides in a civil war and even perfectly legitimate democracy promotion, or opposition to dictators like Duvalier or Pinochet (later)! A more rigorous approach to fact-checking is recommended, given some readers will assume your claims are well-founded.

This article could not have been more timely, given the current transparent and direct participation of ASIO as a player in the Australian political arena, openly endorsing stringent restrictions on basic civic and democratic rights of ordinary Australians to oppose the destruction of the rule of law.

The public statements and speeches by ASIO boss Mike Burgess during 2025 have revealed a clear political position prejudicial to basic democratic values and opposition to international law.

Two examples will suffice.

In August, Burgess cited Israeli sources as a basis for advising Albanese that Iran was responsible for “antisemitic” attacks in Australia, advice immediately used by Albanese to cut diplomatic ties with Iran.

In November, Burgess waxed lyrical to the Lowy Institute about the threat of ordinary Australians to the “social order” of acquiescence in genocide.

Of all the exports Australia has managed over the last 80 years, the most significant and most laudable is one of the biggest ordure farmers on the planet, Rupert Murdoch. The fact that we exported him to the largest faecal farm on the planet is not coincidental.

The sheer volume of the excrement that he so copiously distributes across the planet has made a remarkable contribution to the spreading of the accompanying diseases of ignorance, fear and xenophobia that are bringing the Western experiment to an undignified end.

We have become so swamped by this excrement that we barely hold our collective head above it. This is the genius of Rupert, that we amply assist him in his ordure farming by our own prejudices and bigotries.

The good news is that the Murdoch dynasty is being increasingly marginalised with that other 88% of humanity and is losing the battle to spread his crapulence within a dying legacy media space.

I note that according to the mainstream media, Defence Minister Marles first heard of the plan to build nuclear submarines for Korea in the US through the media. But what is of particular interest today in the submarine space is the news that retiring Vice Admiral Jonathan Mead headed a secret nuclear submarine taskforce from February 2021 onwards, that is seven months before France was blindsided.

Presumably, in that seven months, we still had people beavering away with Naval Group on advanced design work and letting contracts for the French non-nuclear boat. The French, for their part, were busy lining up as much supply chain work as they could with Australian companies.

So how much did that seven months of wasted work cost us Australian taxpayers, and how many Australian companies had their time and money wasted looking at contracts for the French submarine work? All of this under Peter Dutton, who in late August that year told us from Paris that the collaboration on the submarine with the French was on track.

Gough Whitlam was a courageous and principled leader, unlike so many of his peers, who wanted Australia to grow up and cut the apron strings from a remnant of Middle Ages feudalism that was, and is, the British Royal family.

That family is the most significant reason for the failure of Britain to come into the 20th, let alone the 21st century. As it sinks into well-deserved irrelevance, we should not forget its bastardry in removing an Australian Government elected by the people of Australia.

Greg Barns, as always, forensically dismantles the contrived and deceitful justifications and moral insubstantiality of the odiously fascist, colonialist state of Israel and its many Western co-conspirators.

That analysis makes plainly obvious the patent bastardy of the cancerous Israeli infection that has metastasized from the moral void of a dying West. It is hard not to notice that the vast bulk of the crimes against humanity being committed around the planet are being carried out by that West or arise from actions taken by the West to preserve its domination of the world.

That suggests the cancer itself should be surgically removed to stop the process of metastasis. The other 88% of humanity appear to recognise that need and are organising to achieve it.

Zohran Mamdandi’s victory speech was a call to the barricades if ever I heard one. The tone and confidence with which it was delivered recalled Winston Churchill’s words after the German army was turned back at El Alamein: a pivotal point of World War II; “Now this is not the end. It is not even the beginning of the end. But it is perhaps, the end of the beginning.”

It also triggered the words of the late great Leonard Cohen’s anthem: “First we take Manhattan, then we take Berlin.” We live in well-founded hope. Zohran Mamdani is more than a politician; he’s a statesman. And a warrior. Turn the volume up indeed, Mr Trump.

It is not just developers with too much influence in the government sector, it is the lack of separation of capitalism and state that is the source of our problems.

The fox is in control of the hen house.

That’s not to say that there isn’t a role for both, but their roles have been entwined to the point where the tail is wagging the dog.

Contractors and consultants have influence in the employment of public servants and their appointments which leads to poor and biased decision-making.

The current housing crisis is a case in point. Seldom do government decisions and announcements benefit those affected by the housing shortage but they always benefit developers.

Seldom does the removal of regulations actually benefit those in crisis. The purchase by developers of a $1 million home on a large block generally leads to two $1.5 million houses on two small blocks that the same people can’t afford.

Be it houses, schools, health, power, job training, etc you name it and “the average” Australian has not benefitted by the unfettered intrusion of capitalism into the workings of government

In 1945, my grandmother gave me “The Two Princesses: The Story of the King’s Daughters”. I cherished the photos of those two special girls. Fed a solid diet of royalism by every one of society’s institutions, I admired Princess, then Queen, Elizabeth. I was one of millions of Australians who saluted the flag, stood for “God Save the Queen” and pledged to serve her.

When, in 1954, Elizabeth visited Australia for the first time, we flocked to see her, as many times as possible.

On 11 November 1975, I heard radio news of the Dismissal. I remember the shock and the tears that followed.

On 12 November, 1975, I cancelled my subscription to The Australian.

On 13 December 1975, I scrutineered for the Labor Party. As the results became clear, I and many around me were in tears.

When the Queen died, I, who had learned more of history and politics and thus become cynical of all things British, nevertheless continuing to respect Elizabeth, felt the foundations shaking.

Now, having listened to two Dismissal podcasts, I vacillate. Skilled actor? Unfortunate puppet? Beguiled, as were we all, by the story we had been fed?

The monarchy has to go.

As Jane O’Sullivan points out, it’s still just possible for “democratic” nations to defer to voters, to reverse absurdly unsustainable levels of immigration that voters don’t want. In New Zealand, it took a change of government. Not so in Canada.

In Australia, however, Liberal and Labor only have eyes for each other, voters are out of luck. Check what happened, when Sussan Ley’s new Home Affairs spokesman Jonno Duniam (Jonno who?) finally surfaced, with a tame interview for Nine Media.

Did he call out Labor’s “racist” and “neo-Nazi” smears of voters? Did he roast Albanese’s permanent elevation of net migration into the 300,000s? Did he urge slashing immigration to lift housing affordability, as per Canada and New Zealand?

Hell, no. His was an obsequious fan-letter to his “opposite” number Tony Burke, recycling Tony’s time-worn fibs. “United message… explain the plan… Tony Burke and myself show leadership… there will be a number… room to move… no blunt approach… number needs to come down… if you want to take the number up… step by step.“

I would like to thank David Spratt for his article on Ali Kazak.

My interaction with Ali was over 45 years. I learnt what advocacy meant and how justice in all things was the major point in writing on any subject involving people, wherever they may be. I was in truth, a Palestinian and all that meant.

My efforts were constant over all those years, gradually learning the history of Palestine, the injustices over decades, the devious nature of those who sought to bring that country down and the hypocrisy of others who sought to gain materially from the possible death and destruction of a proud nation.

In my judgment, the hateful program for the ownership and possession of Palestine will never occur, knowing and trusting that the majority in this world will awake to the motivations of those weak-minded or corrupt individuals who have allowed this to reach the stage that it has.

One is allowed a hero or two in one’s life. I am proud to say that Ali Kazak has filled that role in my life, without question. He was a truly honourable man, never to be forgotten.