Australia’s Defence Strategic Review and the loss of Australia’s strategic autonomy to the US
https://johnmenadue.com/the-defence-strategic-review-and-the-loss-of-australias-strategic-autonomy-to-the-us/, Pearls and Irritations, By John Menadue, Sep 8, 2022
Over the next two weeks we will be running a series of articles to focus on the Defence Strategic Review (DSR) which is headed by Sir Angus Houston and the Hon. Stephen Smith.
In becoming a US proxy, even patsy, we are on a risky and dangerous path.
Smith was Minister for Defence when the Gillard Government committed to US Marines in Darwin. As Minister he told us in 2011 that ‘Australian troops are making good progress in Uruzgan province…the Taliban is losing ground’. On the domestic front he told us in 2016 that Mark McGowan was a failed party leader. He offered himself, unsuccessfully, for ALP preselection for a State seat in order to defeat McGowan.
The review was announced on 3 August with submissions closing on 30 October.
But is it a genuine review? Minister Marles called it a ‘snap review’. Stephen Smith has told the Western Australian newspaper that a ‘draft report with initial findings would be given to the Minister for Defence Richard Marles on November 1’. That is one day after submissions close!
My major concern however is that this Review will be dominated by the Washington Club and its derivative media followers with the mistaken but widespread and spurious view that China is a military threat to Australia. The Club is very ignorant of Chinese history. It trash talks and goads China day after day.
This Review takes place against a successful anti China campaign in Australia waged by organisations like the Australian Strategic Policy Institute, the Office of National Intelligence, politicians and importantly by our media including the ABC. There has been a colonisation of the mind by western media.
Our new Prime Minister is also not immune to the anti China infection. His first rushed overseas trip was to join the anti China group at QUAD and NATO.
As set out in the terms of reference for the Review on Critical information Requirements. ‘the review is to be informed by the intelligence and strategic assessment of the most concerning threats which challenge Australia’s security’.
It’s clear to everyone that the unstated assumption in setting up this Review is that China is a threat in some undefined way.
Although not naming China, Angus Houston was quickly out of the blocks after the announcement of the Review by commenting that ‘the deteriorating strategic environment facing Australia is the worst I have seen in my lifetime’.
But is that so? Is China a threat?
China may be a threat to the United States Empire with its 800 bases world wide, including 19 in Japan and ROK ringing China, but it is not a threat to the United States or Australia.
Countries of our region have built more balanced and better relations with China than we have.
In the last forty years the US has waged numerous illegal wars resulting in the death and displacement of millions of people. In that time China has not waged a single war.
China will become a threat to us if we continue on our present very dangerous path of acting as a US proxy and tying ourselves ever more closely to the United States a county that is the most violent in the world and almost always at war.
As Jeffrey Sachs put it in a recent interview, ‘A new database …has just shown that there have been more than 100 military interventions by the United States since 1991. It’s really unbelievable’.
On the domestic front the US is more and more a failing or failed state.
Will the US fall into the Thucydides Trap by refusing to accept its own decline and fearful of a rising power, China.
In considering the ‘China threat’ what is the evidence? What is China’s intent? What is its capability to threaten Australia? How does Chinese history inform us? Are China’s security concerns largely limited to its own borders and relations with buffer states?
In Australia today we are witnessing a new version of the “yellow peril’. We seem unable to shake ourselves free of our racist history.
As Hugh White has described it, our unthinking alliance with America means that we may be sleep walking to war with China.
We need to take resolute action to slow the rapid ceding of our national sovereignty to the US. In becoming a US proxy, even patsy, we are on a risky and dangerous path.
The series starts tomorrow.
JOHN PILGER: Silencing the Lambs — How Propaganda Works
By John Pilger
Special to Consortium News 7 Sept 22,
In the 1970s, I met one of Hitler’s leading propagandists, Leni Riefenstahl, whose epic films glorified the Nazis. We happened to be staying at the same lodge in Kenya, where she was on a photography assignment, having escaped the fate of other friends of the Fuhrer.
She told me that the “patriotic messages” of her films were dependent not on “orders from above” but on what she called the “submissive void” of the German public.
Did that include the liberal, educated bourgeoisie? I asked. “Yes, especially them,” she said.
I think of this as I look around at the propaganda now consuming Western societies.
Of course, we are very different from Germany in the 1930s. We live in information societies. We are globalists. We have never been more aware, more in touch, better connected.
Or do we in the West live in a Media Society where brainwashing is insidious and relentless, and perception is filtered according to the needs and lies of state and corporate power?
The United States dominates the Western world’s media. All but one of the top 10 media companies are based in North America. The internet and social media – Google, Twitter, Facebook – are mostly American owned and controlled.
In my lifetime, the United States has overthrown or attempted to overthrow more than 50 governments, mostly democracies. It has interfered in democratic elections in 30 countries. It has dropped bombs on the people of 30 countries, most of them poor and defenceless. It has attempted to murder the leaders of 50 countries. It has fought to suppress liberation movements in 20 countries.
The extent and scale of this carnage is largely unreported, unrecognised, and those responsible continue to dominate Anglo-American political life.
Harold Pinter Broke the Silence
In the years before he died in 2008, the playwright Harold Pinter made two extraordinary speeches, which broke a silence.
“U.S. foreign policy,” he said, is
“best defined as follows: kiss my arse or I’ll kick your head in. It is as simple and as crude as that. What is interesting about it is that it’s so incredibly successful. It possesses the structures of disinformation, use of rhetoric, distortion of language, which are very persuasive, but are actually a pack of lies. It is very successful propaganda. They have the money, they have the technology, they have all the means to get away with it, and they do.”
………………………………… In our systems of corporate democracy, war is an economic necessity, the perfect marriage of public subsidy and private profit: socialism for the rich, capitalism for the poor. The day after 9/11 the stock prices of the war industry soared. More bloodshed was coming, which is great for business.
Today, the most profitable wars have their own brand. They are called “forever wars” — Afghanistan, Palestine, Iraq, Libya, Yemen and now Ukraine. All are based on a pack of lies.
……………………………….. At its summit in Madrid in June, NATO, which is controlled by the United States, adopted a strategy document that militarises the European continent, and escalates the prospect of war with Russia and China. It proposes “multi domain warfighting against nuclear-armed peer-competitor.” In other words, nuclear war.
…………………….. The news from the war in Ukraine is mostly not news, but a one-sided litany of jingoism, distortion, omission. I have reported a number of wars and have never known such blanket propaganda.
In February, Russia invaded Ukraine as a response to almost eight years of killing and criminal destruction in the Russian-speaking region of Donbass on their border.
In 2014, the United States had sponsored a coup in Kiev that got rid of Ukraine’s democratically elected, Russian-friendly president and installed a successor whom the Americans made clear was their man.
………………………………. On April 25, U.S. Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin flew into Kiev and confirmed that America’s aim was to destroy the Russian Federation — the word he used was “weaken.” America had got the war it wanted, waged by an American bankrolled and armed proxy and expendable pawn.
Almost none of this was explained to Western audiences.
[Read: Joe Lauria: Biden Confirms Why the US Needed This War]
Russia’s invasion of Ukraine is wanton and inexcusable. It is a crime to invade a sovereign country. There are no “buts” — except one.
When did the present war in Ukraine begin and who started it? According to the United Nations, between 2014 and this year, some 14,000 people have been killed in the Kiev regime’s civil war on the Donbass. Many of the attacks were carried out by neo-Nazis.
Watch an ITV news report from May 2014, by the veteran reporter James Mates, who is shelled, along with civilians in the city of Mariupol, by Ukraine’s Azov (neo-Nazi) battalion.
In the same month, dozens of Russian-speaking people were burned alive or suffocated in a trade union building in Odessa besieged by fascist thugs, the followers of the Nazi collaborator and anti-Semitic fanatic Stepan Bandera. The New York Times called the thugs “nationalists.”
“The historic mission of our nation in this critical moment,” said Andreiy Biletsky, founder of the Azov Battaltion, “is to lead the White Races of the world in a final crusade for their survival, a crusade against the Semite-led Untermenschen.”
Since February, a campaign of self-appointed “news monitors” (mostly funded by the Americans and British with links to governments) have sought to maintain the absurdity that Ukraine’s neo-Nazis don’t exist.
Airbrushing, once associated with Stalin’s purges, has become a tool of mainstream journalism.
In less than a decade, a “good” China has been airbrushed and a “bad” China has replaced it: from the world’s workshop to a budding new Satan.
Much of this propaganda originates in the U.S., and is transmitted through proxies and “think-tanks,” such as the notorious Australian Strategic Policy Institute, the voice of the arms industry, and by journalists such as Peter Hartcher of The Sydney Morning Herald, who has labeled those spreading Chinese influence as “rats, flies, mosquitoes and sparrows” and suggested these “pests” be “eradicated.”
News about China in the West is almost entirely about the threat from Beijing. Airbrushed are the 400 American military bases that surround most of China, an armed necklace that reaches from Australia to the Pacific and south east Asia, Japan and Korea. The Japanese island of Okinawa and the Korean island of Jeju are like loaded guns aimed point blank at the industrial heart of China. A Pentagon official described this as a “noose.”
Palestine has been misreported for as long as I can remember. ………………………………………………………………..
In recent years, some of the best journalists have been eased out of the mainstream. “Defenestrated” is the word used. The spaces once open to mavericks, to journalists who went against the grain, truth-tellers, have closed.
The case of Julian Assange is the most shocking. When Julian and WikiLeaks could win readers and prizes for The Guardian, The New York Times and other self-important “papers of record,” he was celebrated.
When the dark state objected and demanded the destruction of hard drives and the assassination of Julian’s character, he was made a public enemy. Vice President Joe Biden compared him to a “hi-tech terrorist.” Hillary Clinton asked, “Can’t we just drone this guy?”
The ensuing campaign of abuse and vilification against Julian Assange — the U.N. rapporteur on torture called it “mobbing” — brought the liberal press to its lowest ebb. We know who they are. I think of them as collaborators: as Vichy journalists
When will real journalists stand up? An inspirational samizdat already exists on the internet: Consortium News, founded by the great reporter Robert Parry, Max Blumenthal’s The Grayzone, Mint Press News, Media Lens, DeclassifiedUK, Alborada, Electronic Intifada, WSWS, ZNet, ICH, CounterPunch, Independent Australia, the work of Chris Hedges, Patrick Lawrence, Jonathan Cook, Diana Johnstone, Caitlin Johnstone and others who will forgive me for not mentioning them here.
And when will writers stand up, as they did against the rise of fascism in the 1930s? When will film-makers stand up, as they did against the Cold War in the 1940s? When will satirists stand up, as they did a generation ago?
Having soaked for 82 years in a deep bath of righteousness that is the official version of the last world war, isn’t it time those who are meant to keep the record straight declared their independence and decoded the propaganda? The urgency is greater than ever. https://consortiumnews.com/2022/09/07/john-pilger-silencing-the-lambs-how-propaganda-works/
Trump’s Top-Secret Document Hoard Included Nuclear Weapons Data
William Rivers Pitt, Truthout, September 7, 2022
Donald Trump now has at least 19 attorneys defending him in eight or more investigations, according to Politico. If the revelations keep piling up, that number could double in about as much time as it takes a box of bunny rabbits to breed. Finding that help won’t be easy, either; this is an area of the law that isn’t lousy with specific experts, and the ones available have this thing about getting paid.
Plus, the latest development in the saga would have most lawyers running for the hills.
“A document describing a foreign government’s military defenses, including its nuclear capabilities, was found by FBI agents who searched former president Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago residence and private club last month,” reports The Washington Post. “Some of the seized documents detail top-secret U.S. operations so closely guarded that many senior national security officials are kept in the dark about them. Only the president, some members of his Cabinet or a near-Cabinet-level official could authorize other government officials to know details of these special-access programs.”………………
“A fortress mindset feeds the U.S. government’s huge ‘defense’ budget — which is higher than the military budgets of the next 10 countries combined — while the Pentagon maintains about 750 military bases overseas,” author and activist Norman Solomon writes for Truthout. “But victimology is among Washington’s official poses, in sync with a core belief that the United States is at the center of the world’s importance and must therefore police the world to the best of its capacity.”
The core nature of secrets is their importance, which is why they are usually so well guarded, and why this latest Trump debacle has so many people freaked. …………………………
Understand: No intelligence body on the planet would gladly grant top-secret access to a person like Donald Trump. He is the living embodiment of an easily compromised individual, a walking blackmail target with debts on his debts. The only reason he got his hands on all that stuff is because the country went berserk and made him president, and presidents are automatically gifted top-flight clearance by dint of electoral victory.
Yet he remains Donald Trump, the blowhard desperate to hide the small fraction of a man within.
Even being president of the United States wasn’t enough to assuage his insecurity, so, perhaps, he surrounded himself with boxes of secret documents that made him feel whatever passes for powerful in his shriveled little soul.
Who knows what country those nuke documents were describing. Israel? China? Russia? Does it even matter at this juncture? Thanks to a million profit-driven war decisions made over the last 80 years, we exist within a wildly delicate latticework of perils that are mostly left over from the Cold War. Not our fault, but all our problem. https://truthout.org/articles/trumps-top-secret-document-hoard-included-nuclear-weapons-data/?eType=EmailBlastContent&eId=df913dd0-f214-4843-a78f-46849632c0c5
Race Correction and the X-Ray Machine — The Controversy over Increased Radiation Doses for Black Americans in 1968
New England Journal of Medicine Itai Bavli, Ph.D., and David S. Jones, M.D., Ph.D.
In May 23, 1968, Howard Goldman, director of the New York Bureau of X-Ray Technology, acknowledged that x-ray technicians routinely exposed Black patients to doses of radiation that were higher than those White patients received.1 This practice, which adhered to guidelines from x-ray machine manufacturers, may have been widespread in the 1960s. Senate hearings held that month, as political unrest rocked the country, prompted public outcry and led to calls from state and federal officials to end the practice. Yet in the 21st century, despite growing interest in the problems of race and racism in medicine, race adjustment of x-rays has received little attention.2-6 It’s important to understand the origins of this practice, its rationales, its possible harms, and related controversies. The history shows how assumptions about biologic differences between Black and White people affected the theory and practice of medicine in the United States in ways that may have harmed patients. These insights can inform ongoing debates about the uses of race in medicine.7-10
………………………………….. despite recent attempts to mitigate the harmful effects of racial biases in medicine, race-based beliefs and practices, especially the use of racial categories, remain widespread.8 The history of race adjustment for x-ray dosing reveals how mistaken assumptions can be admitted into medical practices — and how those practices can be ended.
Racialization of the X-Ray
The discovery of x-rays in 1895 revolutionized medicine. It allowed doctors to diagnose and treat many medical problems more easily.22 The ability to image teeth also transformed dental care. However, as x-ray technology developed in the early 20th century, false beliefs about biologic differences between Black and White people affected how doctors used this technology.
Ideas about racial differences in bone and skin thickness appeared in the 19th century and remained widespread throughout the 20th.
………………………………… The belief that Black people have denser bones, more muscle, or thicker skin led radiologists and technicians to use higher radiation exposure during x-ray procedures.
…………………………………….. In the 1950s and 1960s, x-ray technologists were told to use higher radiation doses to penetrate Black bodies. Roentgen Signs in Clinical Diagnosis, published in 1956, described the radiographic examination of a Black person’s skull as a “technical problem” that required a modified technique……………………………..
Debate and Denial in the Senate
The practice of giving larger x-ray doses to Black patients was brought to national attention in May 1968, when the U.S. Senate held hearings about the Radiation Control for Health and Safety Act of 1968.27
………………………… At the hearings on May 15, Ralph Nader mentioned that technicians exposed Black patients to higher x-ray doses: “A practice widespread around the country is that by technologists and their supervisors giving Negroes one-fourth to one-half larger X-ray dosages than white patients because of a generalized intuition or folklore.”27
…………………………………… Race classifications have traditionally been based on skin pigmentation and other superficial physical traits. One might have expected x-ray technologies, which see through the skin to deeper structures beneath, to be spared racialization. They were not. During the 20th century, radiologists and device manufacturers embedded racial assumptions in the basic practices of radiology. Nader, a consumer advocate working on radiation safety, exposed the practices of race adjustment to public scrutiny, triggering investigation and rapid action by federal and state officials and by physicians and device manufacturers. However, radiologists and technicians retained the ability to determine x-ray exposures. We do not know how long the practice of race adjustment actually endured……………………….. more https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMms2206281
Operator doubts German plan to keep nuclear plants on standby
Germany plans to delay closure of two nuclear power plants amid disruption to Russian gas deliveries to Europe.
Germany’s plans to delay the closure of two nuclear plants were thrown into confusion on Wednesday, with the operator of one saying the request to keep it on standby was not technically possible as the government said it had been misunderstood.
Berlin announced on Monday that it plans to keep two out of three remaining nuclear power stations on standby to have enough electricity through the winter.
The operator of one of the plants, E.ON, said on Wednesday that it believed it is not possible to put its Isar 2 facility in reserve mode beyond its scheduled closure at the end of 2022.
“We communicated on Monday evening that nuclear power plants are not suitable for reserve power plant operation for technical reasons,” said E.ON, adding it was in contact with the government on the issue………………………………
In January, the government called nuclear energy dangerous, objecting to EU proposals that would let the technology remain part of the bloc’s plans for a climate-friendly future. Its energy plan before was to switch off its remaining three nuclear power plants at the end of this year and phase out coal by 2030.
Zaporizhzhia: proposals for demilitarised zone around Europe’s biggest nuclear power plant are unprecedented – expert reveals
The Conversation Ross Peel, Research and Knowledge Transfer Manager, King’s College London, 8nSept 22,
“………………….. In a much-anticipated September 6 update, the UN’s International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) recommended this safety and security zone be put around the Zaporizhzhia plant in southeastern Ukraine to avoid a nuclear disaster.
This would be the first time an international body has overseen an endangered nuclear plant during a war. In previous military actions involving nuclear power plants, they were destroyed outright by aerial bombing – but mostly while under construction, before they were operational, or before building up inventories of hazardous spent nuclear fuel in vulnerable cooling ponds.
Previously, the IAEA has only been able to gain access to such sites afterwards, “to pick up the pieces”. For the IAEA to intervene directly in the delivery of safety and security would be unprecedented, and legally and practically very challenging.
There has been no agreement yet from Russia to these proposals……………………….
This report follows a long-awaited visit by IAEA experts, who began inspecting the Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant on September 2. The plant has been occupied by Russian forces since March, with Ukrainian staff working under stressful conditions to prevent a nuclear disaster. Since August, the plant has been shelled many times, damaging critical safety equipment and services. Both Russia and Ukraine blame each another for these attacks…………………………
With IAEA experts now permanently on site, the agency will be able to receive direct updates from its own personnel. They will be able to report on conditions for Ukrainian staff, as well as the status of nuclear safety and security equipment and military actions……….. https://theconversation.com/zaporizhzhia-proposals-for-demilitarised-zone-around-europes-biggest-nuclear-power-plant-are-unprecedented-expert-reveals-189927
Nuclear-news.net – international news is migrating to this site
Temporarily, I hope
Digital Business Media (based in Melbourne) is not allowing us to renew the domain name nuclear-news.net. (Due for renewal payment on Sat 3rd Sept. They expired it on Sunday 4th Sept and refused to accept payment on Mon 6th Sept.)
SO – this site is now taking over the international news, (includes some Australian)
For specifically Australian news, please go to https://nuclearnewsaustralia.wordpress.com/
German chancellor rejects calls to reverse nuclear power plant closures
Kate Connolly in Berlin, Thu 8 Sep 2022, Olaf Scholz says country has enough energy to get through winter after Russia cut gas supplies
The German chancellor, Olaf Scholz, has rejected calls for his government to commit to a longer-term extension of the life of the country’s nuclear power plants and insisted that Europe’s largest economy would have enough energy to get through the winter.
Scholz shut down criticism from the opposition conservative alliance and at least one leading economist, who have described his coalition’s decision to keep two remaining reactors in emergency reserve rather than letting them produce electricity, as “madness” while the government refuses to reverse its long-term plan to close down the last remaining plants…………….
The crisis, triggered by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, has been exacerbated in recent weeks by Moscow’s reduction of gas supplies to Germany, which was followed a week ago by a complete halt. Moscow has cited maintenance issues linked to sanctions imposed by the west.
Scholz accused Friedrich Merz’s conservative alliance (CDU/CSU) of refusing to accept responsibility for its role in the crisis, calling it “the party which holds complete responsibility for the fact that Germany made decisions to withdraw both from coal and from atomic energy, but never had the strength to enter into anything else”. He also accused the conservatives of failing to embrace renewable energy and actively campaigning against it.
“You were incapable of bringing about the expansion of renewable energies. You led defensive battles against every single wind turbine,” he said. By trying now to save as much gas, electricity and oil as it can before winter kicks in – in part with the construction of LNG terminals and expanding renewable energy – Scholz said his government was “solving problems that the union failed to recognise as such when it was in power”.
Scholz said Germans would “rise above themselves” and deal with the coming winter with “with boldness and bravery” and said that Germany was close to its goal of becoming independent from Russian gas exports. Gas storage facilities were 86% full on Wednesday……………
On Monday Habeck had announced that two nuclear reactors would remain “on standby” supported by the necessary staff, equipment and security, but would not be producing electricity unless needed……………….
Amira Mohamed Ali, parliamentary leader of the far-left Die Linke, accused the coalition government of having “no social conscience”. She urged the government to approach Russia in an attempt to bring it to the negotiating table and end its hostilities in Ukraine.
The instability of nuclear power is one of the main reason for not relying on it, the economics ministry argued when it presented its plans on Monday. Currently only 28 of 56 plants in France are on the grid, due in part to the shortage of cooling water linked to this summer’s drought, meaning Germany has had to supply its neighbour with electricity.
PM grills Peter Dutton on location of power plants amid Coalition’s nuclear push
Albanese said after “22 failed plans” the Coalition now wants “to go towards nuclear energy”………………. we know they have to be near urban areas and water.”
the shadow climate change minister, Chris Bowen, ruled out consideration of nuclear power because he said “it is by far the most expensive form of energy”.
Guardian, Paul Karp, @Paul_Karp,Wed 7 Sep 2022
Peter Dutton has doubled down on Liberal support for nuclear power, pre-empting a review of its energy policy by arguing nuclear will be needed to support renewables.
Dutton told the Minerals Council on Wednesday that Australia needs a “frank debate” about nuclear energy, suggesting that it has a “wonderful opportunity to add value” to its uranium resources.
The comments sparked a demand from the prime minister, Anthony Albanese, in question time for the Liberals to nominate “where the plants are going to be”.
The Coalition didn’t do much on nuclear energy while in office. Why are they talking about it now?Read more
On Wednesday Dutton confirmed that he appointed Ted O’Brien as shadow energy minister in part because a committee inquiry he chaired in 2019 recommended the partial lifting of the moratorium on nuclear energy to allow for “new and emerging nuclear technologies”.
Dutton suggested nuclear energy could also help Australia “power up irrigation and open up thousands of square kilometres of export opportunities” before concluding the government should “at least allow” the community to have a debate about it.
In August the shadow climate change minister, Chris Bowen, ruled out consideration of nuclear power because he said “it is by far the most expensive form of energy”.
“I mean, this is economic illiteracy from an opposition searching for relevance,” he told ABC News Breakfast.
“[Nuclear] is slow to deploy. It couldn’t be deployed in Australia until 2030.
“The CSIRO has made it very, very clear renewables are the cheapest form of energy. Nuclear is the most expensive. Why with rising energy prices you would put in the most expensive form of energy available is beyond me.”
Albanese replied that the government stands by the modelling supporting the claim, and that Labor’s policy was based on the systems plan of the Australian Energy Market Operator, which identified it would “promote investment in renewables which is the cheapest form of energy”.
Albanese said after “22 failed plans” the Coalition now wants “to go towards nuclear energy”.
“And they can say, if you like, where the plants are going to be. I’ll look forward to their review, letting us know … [because] we know they have to be near urban areas and water.”
While Labor raised the spectre of campaigning on the location of putative nuclear power plants, Dutton accused the government of asking Australians to sign up to an Indigenous voice to parliament “sight unseen”.
“We have no idea what it means for the mining sector,” Dutton told the Minerals Council earlier.
“We don’t know whether a voice that doesn’t represent the elders that you negotiate with or that your agreement is with in a particular location, now, they might be usurped and [the voice will] exercise a veto, right? That would damage your employees, that would damage your business.”
Earlier, Dutton said it was an “inconvenient truth” for climate activists that “decarbonisation will require more mining”, due to critical minerals’ importance in renewable energy, batteries and electric vehicles.
“I take some delight knowing it must keep them up at night.”
Dutton said the Liberals don’t support “locking in” the 43% emissions reduction target in legislation because the “inflexible position” might disadvantage Australia if competitors did not meet their targets and it would make it “harder if not impossible” for government agencies to fund resources projects……………………… https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2022/sep/07/pm-grills-peter-dutton-on-location-of-power-plants-amid-coalitions-nuclear-push
Topics
1.This month.
The Road to War brings a sharp focus to why it is not in Australia’s best interest to be dragged into a war with China which will almost inevitably go nuclear very quickly. The filmmaker has interviewed some of Australia’s senior foreign policy analysts who have vast experience behind them in analysing what really is going on here as the United States rattles its sabres with China. And sets us up to be its proxy, like the poor Ukranians have been fed into the Meatgrinder. So America can remain the Top Dog. The Road to War reveals how the United States through its spy base at Pine Gap and by stationing six nuclear capable B52 bombers in the Top End (without permission from the traditional owners) is making Australia a prime nuclear target if the current war of words suddenly melts down into full scale war.
The Road to War shows the implicit connection between Carbon emissions (the US military uses a whopping 70% of America’s annual petroleum to move its armies and vast War Machine around the globe to its 800+ military bases..but under a loophole wangled at Kyoto, the US military does not have to report its C02 annual emissions). The Road to War starts screening at selected cities and regional centres in March. See the trailer end for details.
Antinuclear 