Antinuclear

Toxic fantasy nuked; one year on from the Federal election 

, https://www.acf.org.au/news/toxic-fantasy-nuked-one-year-on-from-the-federal-election

Exactly one year ago Australians braved the how to vote cards, ate or avoided democracy sausages and used a pencil to help write the next part of the Australian story.

In the months leading up to the 2025 federal election, papers, airwaves and social media platforms were full of talk about nuclear. 

Then Opposition Leader Peter Dutton dubbed the 2025 federal election ‘a referendum on nuclear power’. It was the biggest policy difference between the two major political parties. The Coalition promised to build multiple nuclear reactors at seven sites across Australia while Labor, the Green and most independents opposed this nuclear plan and strongly supported renewables. 

Nuclear proponents spent large, promised much and did their best to sidestep scrutiny over cost, timing, water, waste and more. 

Environment groups joined with trade unions, public health experts, First Nation representatives and community members from regions targeted for reactors to make the case for a renewable energy future, free from nuclear risk and delays. 

The message was clear: Nuclear is too risky, too expensive and too slow. 

And at the end of months of talk, talkback, information stalls, protests and public forums, Australia voted. 

And voted unequivocally no to nuclear.

The Coalition had its worst defeat since the formation of the Liberal Party in 1944, and nuclear champion Peter Dutton became the first sitting federal Opposition Leader in Australian history to lose their own seat at a general election. Seven News political editor Mark Riley described the Coalition result as ‘catastrophic’, adding “the party that chose nuclear energy as its policy has exploded in a nuclear bomb set on them by the voters tonight.”

Voters saw the Coalition’s nuclear fantasy for what it was: a toxic furphy designed only to prolong the life of coal and gas. They made a conscious and clear decision to reject nuclear power and provide our politicians with a clear mandate to get on with harnessing Australia’s abundant renewable energy resources to power our country. 

Renewables already meet around half of Australia’s electricity needs, and this figure is growing every day. 

Responsible renewables mean lasting regional jobs, low carbon and proven power.  

Renewables also mean energy independence and energy security. Ships in the Strait of Hormuz might stop, but the wind and sun do not. 

One year ago, Australians had a clear energy choice – and right across the nation we made a clear energy decision – our energy future is renewable, not radioactive.

May 5, 2026 Posted by Christina Macpherson | politics | Leave a comment

Royal commission report doesn’t help us start making sense of Bondi terror attack

The Conversation, Keiran Hardy, Associate Professor, Griffith Criminology Institute, Griffith University, April 30, 2026 Justice Virginia Bell has handed the governor-general her interim findings from the Royal Commission into Antisemitism and Social Cohesion. Prime Minister Anthony Albanese responded immediately by promising to implement all its recommendations.

The interim report recommends specific changes to counter-terrorism policy – and a speedy resolution to the lagging gun buyback scheme.

These sorts of changes may help. But they don’t begin to answer deeper questions about how a terror attack on that scale could occur in Australia. The commission is yet to examine how underlying conditions might have fuelled the attack, and what else governments, their agencies and we as a society must do to prevent such a tragedy from happening again.

What does the interim report recommend?

The interim report contains 14 recommendations, five of them confidential.

Of the nine public recommendations, nearly all focus on counter-terrorism policy and the ways government agencies operate. For example, recommendations three through six focus on the Australia-New Zealand Counter-Terrorism Committee: a high-level coordination body made up of senior members of government.

The interim report recommends the committee be included in the Australian government’s Crisis Management Framework. The committee should brief National Cabinet at least annually.

Recommendation seven says ministers on the National Security Committee of cabinet should participate in a counter-terrorism exercise within nine months of each federal election.

These changes will not stop a terrorist from committing another attack. And most Australians could be forgiven for having never heard of these committees.

There’s also no reason why this all couldn’t have been investigated, possibly more quickly, by the original, departmental inquiry announced by Albanese. This was to be led by former head of ASIO, Dennis Richardson.

Richardson recently resigned from the royal commission, saying he felt like an overpaid research officer. He was also worried the process would take too long to deliver concrete recommendations on policing and intelligence…………………………………………………………………..

What can we expect next?

Public hearings for the royal commission will begin next week. In the first round, people with lived experience of antisemitism are expected to give evidence.

After that, it remains to be seen where the inquiry will direct its focus.

Its terms of reference are extremely broad, covering antisemitism, social cohesion, training for law enforcement, border control and immigration, radicalisation, specific circumstances surrounding the attack, and anything else that might be “reasonably incidental” or relevant.

It has so far received more than 3,500 submissions. The commission must report back by December 14 this year, before the one-year anniversary of the attack.

To report meaningfully on all these topics on such a pressured timeline will be a monumental task. Some focus may be necessary, but there will be valid differences of opinion as to whether this inquiry is primarily about antisemitism, social cohesion, counter-terrorism, radicalisation, the Bondi attack, or all of the above.

At the moment, it is about all these things, which may ultimately undermine what it is able to contribute on any one.

Bell clearly knows the scale of the task. She has warned that “examining the ways in which we might strengthen social cohesion in Australia could well be the work of years, not months”.

For now, there is little in the interim report for Australians to start making sense of last year’s terror and tragedy in Bondi. https://theconversation.com/royal-commission-report-doesnt-help-us-start-making-sense-of-bondi-terror-attack-281859?utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Latest%20from%20The%20Conversation%20for%20May%201%202026%20-%203756238464&utm_content=Latest%20from%20The%20Conversation%20for%20May%201%202026%20-%203756238464+CID_8e5ae0e85bb178c16e80a5a039f5de96&utm_source=campaign_monitor&utm_term=Royal%20commission%20report%20doesnt%20help%20us%20start%20making%20sense%20of%20Bondi%20terror%20attack

May 5, 2026 Posted by Christina Macpherson | politics | Leave a comment

Antisemitism Royal Commission dilemma: not all Jews think the same

None of this is to excuse ‘real’ antisemitism. If the latest Pew  Research Center survey, just released in the last few days in the USA, is anything to go by, 60% of US adults have an unfavourable view of Israel.

by Jeffrey Loewenstein | Apr 27, 2026 | 

With the Antisemitism Royal Commission due to publish its interim report this week, a reckoning between Judaism and Israel is long overdue. Jewish community leader Jeffrey Loewenstein with the story.

Let it be said, unequivocally, antisemitism per se, as indeed any form of vilification or bigotry, is to be abhorred and has no place in a civilised community.

The vexed question of antisemitism, and what that actually means and encompasses – let alone how to combat it – will be front and centre of the Royal Commission on Antisemitism and Social  Cohesion’s deliberations and, one assumes, findings.

The so-called majority of the Jewish community for whom the likes of the ECAJ, the Zionist  Federation, AIJAC and the NCJW seek to speak, have shown themselves as either unequivocally positive mouthpieces supporting Israel’s actions – be it the invasion of Gaza, the killing and maiming of its people, starving Gazans, demolishing Gazan infrastructure, denying medical supplies and equipment entering Gaza, the lawlessness, the so-called settlers in the West  Bank, etc.,

“or simply staying silent, no matter how egregious Israel’s actions have been.“

To say that it demonstrates an indifference to the suffering of the Gazans or the Palestinians in the West Bank is putting it mildly. It certainly demonstrates a lack of humanity and an absence of a moral compass.

And this from a people who claim to abide by the Ten Commandments and the edict of Rabbi Hillel, “That which is hateful to you, do not do unto your fellow.” That is the whole Torah; the rest is the explanation; go and learn.” (Babylonian Talmud, Shabbat 31a).

Israel’s ‘success’

The man in the street who probably considers Israel as a ‘successful’ smart country, a leader in technology and medicine, with a ‘smart’ Mossad security service, watching the nightly news bulletin with its stark images of the wanton killing and maiming of Gazans by the Israelis and children starving – and now the ongoing onslaught being undertaken by the Israelis in Lebanon –  is going to be left angered and wondering how it is Israel – or is it simply the Jews – are allowing all of this to happen.

Add to that seeing Jews in Australia regularly parading with Israeli flags draped around their shoulders and waving small Israeli flags is almost certainly going to lead the average person to accept what Israeli PM Netanyahu has been saying for years – that Israel, and he, speak for and represent all Jews in the world.

“As for this writer, certainly not!“

Even our political leaders are confused. One Federal Minister justified the entry into Australia of Israeli President Herzog on the grounds that the Jewish community sought comfort post Bondi from “their national leader”. Again, not true for many.

A royal dilemma

The Royal Commissioner is going to be confronted with some stark facts. For starters, how the majority of Jews view Israel and support it.An example relating to those tragically slain in Bondi: video footage and photos of the Bondi Chabad rabbi post October 7, handing over monies in the West Bank in support of the settlers and posing with a rifle and rocket.

The ready conflating of being anti-Israel and what is said to be antisemitism is nowhere better seen than in the ECAJ Report on antisemitism in Australia, citing as part of its statistics how, allegedly, antisemitism has risen in Australia post October 7 by something such as a daubing on a wall “Free  Palestine”.

The Special Envoy on antisemitism, Jillian Segal, would have us believe that the weekly protest marches, and even the eventful march across the Sydney Harbour Bridge (under the Banner, March for Humanity), engendered antisemitism.

Antisemitic or anti-Israel?

There have been many attempts to conflate being anti-Israel with being antisemitic, including pushing the IHRA “definition” of antisemitism.

Aside from many learned Jewish scholars challenging the definition, many Jews, critical of Israel, would be “caught” as being anti-Semitic. Members of the Australian Jewish community are now publicly (even on ABC Radio National) resorting to calling those Jews who speak out about Israel’s actions as being “anti-Jewish”.

Interestingly, a research report, ‘The Journeys and Destinations of Young Jewish Anti-Zionists’, out of the USA a couple of months ago, concluded, inter alia, that many said to be anti-Zionist were deeply knowledgeable about Jewish practice and history, with some having attended Jewish day schools and some serving as rabbis.

There is no reason to think that those findings in the USA would not equally apply in Australia.

It has hardly been surprising that people have been venting their anger at Israel’s actions. The weekly demonstrations for more than 2 ½ years are clear evidence of that.

“The Royal Commissioner and the majority of Jews in Australia are going to have to grapple with anti-Israel sentiment.“

And in both political parties, majorities of adults under the age of 50 now rate Israel and Netanyahu negatively, and six-in-ten have a very or somewhat unfavourable view of Israel. It is likely a survey in Australia would parallel the US one.

The Royal Commissioner will be hard-pressed to come up with definitive findings as her mandate requires. For their part, there are going to be many Jews unable to explain why there has been this so-called antisemitism as distinct from things best described as simple anti-Israeli / anti-Zionist sentiment.

One very obvious question, and the critical one which is the elephant in  the room no one seems to want to ask is,

“why is it that this so-called and alleged antisemitism has risen since 7 October?“

Jeffrey Loewenstein

Jeffrey Loewenstein LL.B was a member of the Victorian Bar and a one-time Chairman of the Anti-Defamation Commission and member of the Jewish Community Council of Victoria.

May 4, 2026 Posted by Christina Macpherson | politics | Leave a comment

The Enforcement. The lobby that bought Australian democracy

by Andrew Brown | Apr 29, 2026, https://michaelwest.com.au/the-enforcement-the-lobby-that-bought-australian-democracy/

Australia’s sovereignty is routinely violated by Israel. Our institutions utterly subject to foreign interference.  Andrew Brown presents the devastating case for a royal commission into Zionist influence in Australia.

Yesterday we laid out the machinery of the most serious foreign influence operation ever conducted on Australian soil: the quasi-diplomatic network operating from inside Australian institutions, the 500-plus politicians and journalists conditioned in Tel Aviv at a foreign government’s expense, the foreign minister instructed by a donor network to recant established international law, the attorney-general who adopted Israeli legal talking points as official Australian government language, the $164 million in security infrastructure extracted from Australian taxpayers for a community of 120,000 people, and the government-appointed envoy drawn from the lobby itself whose job is to put Israeli government policy beyond the reach of Australian public criticism.

Today we examine the enforcement arm. What this operation does to individuals, institutions, and the fundamental democratic rights of ordinary Australians who exercise their right to disagree. And what it did, for more than a decade, with Australian sovereignty itself.

Begin with the act of sovereign violation so grave that it should have ended the bilateral relationship and produced a permanent rupture in Australian foreign policy.

It did neither. Mossad, the Israeli state intelligence agency, operated a spy cell based in Sydney for more than a decade. Under ASIO’s nose. Using Australian infrastructure. Recruiting from Australian universities.

In 2010, Mossad operatives carrying forged Australian passports entered Dubai, a country with which Australia maintained cordial diplomatic relations, and assassinated Palestinian leader Mahmoud Al-Mabhouh. An Israeli diplomat in Canberra, Amir Laty, was expelled over his connection to the cell.

“The Australian government attempted to keep his expulsion secret to avoid embarrassing Israel.”

Ben Zygier, an Australian citizen known as Prisoner X, worked for Mossad, spied on fellow students at Monash University, and used his Australian passport to conduct espionage operations across Arab and Muslim countries. He died in an Israeli prison.

A New Zealand Mossad cell was separately caught attempting to fraudulently obtain New Zealand passports. The Australian official who summarised the government’s operative posture did so anonymously, because to say it on the record would have been politically unsurvivable.

He was quoted by journalist Peter Hartcher in the Sydney Morning Herald on 26 February 2010. Israel, he said, had calculated that even if caught forging Australian passports to carry out targeted assassinations,

“Canberra would not retaliate. It wouldn’t matter who sat in the prime minister’s chair.”

The Israelis, this official said, know they’ve got us by the balls, partly because of the Israel lobby. State-sanctioned murder using forged Australian documents.

A foreign intelligence service operating on Australian soil for over a decade. An expelled diplomat whose removal the government tried to hide.

And the judgement of an Australian national security official that none of it would produce consequences because the lobby had made consequences impossible. If China had done one tenth of this, Australia would have severed diplomatic relations and jailed everyone it could reach.

“Israel did all of it and received a quiet request not to do it again.”

State premiers captured

In the domestic political arena, three state premiers have served as the lobby’s most recent and most openly authoritarian instruments.

Peter Malinauskas personally intervened to cancel a Palestinian author from Adelaide Writers’ Week. The festival director resigned.

“The event collapsed.”

A state premier, acting on behalf of the interests of a foreign government, destroyed a celebrated literary event and ended a festival director’s role in the process.

David Crisafulli’s Queensland government made two phrases associated with Palestinian solidarity punishable by up to two years imprisonment. An eighteen-year-old Australian was charged for the act of wearing a shirt. Twenty people were arrested at a peaceful protest for the act of chanting.

Chris Minns rushed legislation through the NSW parliament on Christmas Eve 2025, in a deliberate legislative ambush, handing the police commissioner power to ban all protest marches across entire areas of Sydney for up to three months following a declared terror incident.

A unanimous bench of the NSW Court of Appeal struck it down as an unconstitutional burden on the implied freedom of political communication.

“Three premiers. Three states. One foreign government’s interests.”

Zero words of criticism from the Prime Minister of Australia. The suppression of political speech and peaceful assembly on behalf of a foreign power, conducted by state governments and met with federal silence. In what functioning democracy does this not constitute a crisis of the highest order?

Crushing ‘difficult’ people

Now watch what the enforcement machinery does to individuals. Grace Tame was the 2021 Australian of the Year. A survivor of institutional child sexual abuse who built a national platform of such moral clarity that the entire political establishment had learned to treat her as beyond reproach. She began speaking about Palestine.

She attended protests. She shared Human Rights Watch reports documenting starvation in Gaza. In February 2026 she attended a rally in Sydney protesting the visit of Israeli President Isaac Herzog and led the crowd in a chant.

What followed was not a spontaneous public backlash. 

“It was a coordinated campaign of economic and reputational destruction,”

executed with the speed and precision that only a well-resourced, well-organised, and permanently mobilised network can produce.

Nike cut her sponsorship within days.

Her speaking engagements disappeared from her calendar. By March 2026 she told a conference in Hobart that it was her last engagement for the year. It was March. Twenty-five thousand Australians signed a petition demanding her Australian of the Year award be stripped from her.

Coalition members of parliament stood in the national legislature and called her a terrorist sympathiser.

And Anthony Albanese, the Prime Minister of Australia, when directly asked to describe Grace Tame, produced a single word: difficult.

“Difficult.”

The survivor who forced child sexual abuse onto the national agenda at enormous personal cost. Difficult. The woman who said that Palestinian civilians, like all civilians, had a right not to be bombed, starved, or shot. Difficult.

The Prime Minister of Australia reached for the oldest and most reliable instrument of dismissal in the political class’s toolkit: the word that powerful men have always used for women who refuse to stay within the lines drawn for them by the people who write the cheques.

The lobby made no public statement. It did not need to. Nike had already cut the sponsorship. The speaking circuit had already closed. The petition had already collected its signatures.

The MPs had already used the word terrorist in Hansard. The work had been done without the lobby needing to appear in the story at all.

“That is what mature, embedded institutional power looks like.”

It does not need to act visibly. It has already arranged for everyone else to act on its behalf.

The reach extends into the newsrooms and it has been there for decades. Veteran ABC journalist John Lyons documented it in his 2021 book Dateline Jerusalem, writing that in forty years of journalism he had never encountered a lobby as formidable, well-funded, or relentlessly effective as the pro-Israel lobby in Australia, and that material the lobby succeeded in suppressing here was routinely published in Israel without consequence or controversy.

Best funded foreign influence operation in Australia

Bob Carr called Lyons’ account the definitive record of the most concerted and best-funded foreign influence operation in Australia.

Every journalist who has worked on this subject in the Australian press knows what Lyons and Carr documented, because they have experienced it themselves: organised complaints to management, coordinated pressure on executives, personal vilification campaigns, threats to advertiser relationships

The lobby does not need to own Australian media. It only needs editors and proprietors to understand the cost of genuine independence, and to calculate that the cost exceeds the benefit. In most Australian newsrooms, they have made that calculation and arrived at compliance.

The case of Antoinette Lattouf demonstrated the consequences for those who don’t. She was removed from ABC air in December 2023 for sharing a Human Rights Watch report documenting Israel’s use of starvation as a weapon of war in Gaza.

The Federal Court subsequently found the ABC had breached the Fair Work Act by terminating her engagement on the basis that she held a political opinion opposing the Israeli military campaign.

The Sydney Morning Herald revealed that a WhatsApp group calling itself Lawyers for Israel had lobbied ABC management directly and specifically for her removal.

Australia’s public broadcaster, funded by Australian taxpayers and constitutionally obligated to editorial independence,

“removed a journalist from air at the instruction of a foreign-aligned lobby group operating by messaging app”

That is not an editorial error. That is the surrender of a public institution to private foreign-aligned coercion. And the ABC’s board and management have never been required to account for it.

If it were China?

Apply the same facts to China. Not as analogy. As a direct accountability test. If Chinese-linked organisations were the single largest private funders of overseas trips to federal MPs, ASIO would have declared it a national security emergency.

If a Chinese intelligence agency had based a spy cell in Sydney for over a decade using forged Australian passports to conduct state-sanctioned assassinations abroad, it would constitute the gravest breach of Australian sovereignty in the country’s peacetime history and the bilateral relationship would not survive it.

If a Chinese-aligned lobby had pressured the ABC to remove a journalist critical of Chinese government policy, the story would have dominated national coverage for months and produced a parliamentary inquiry within weeks.

If a serving foreign minister had declared China’s struggles are our struggles, their values are our values from an award ceremony podium, her resignation would have been demanded before she left the building. If the attorney-general had told a Senate hearing that calling Tibet an occupied territory was too pejorative to use in official Australian discourse, he would not have returned to the chamber.

If three state premiers had introduced legislation to criminalise speech critical of Chinese government policy, or to give police the power to ban all marches in city zones for months at a time, the word used across every editorial in this country would have been the same:

“treason.”

We do not need to speculate.

We have watched the Chinese comparison play out in real time at a fraction of this scale and the consequences were terminal. Sam Dastyari expressed views aligned with Chinese positions after accepting connected donations. No secrets passed. No law was broken. His career was finished.

Andrew Robb left the ministry overseeing Darwin Port and signed a $2.25 million consulting contract with the Chinese company that had just received a 99-year lease on it.

The scandal produced years of national coverage and ultimately the Foreign Influence Transparency Scheme: legislation designed specifically to track and constrain the purchase of access to Australian political institutions by foreign-aligned interests. ASIO names foreign interference, the public shorthand for China, as a top-tier national security threat in every annual assessment it publishes.

Except for Israel

The entire architecture of Australian national security is built on a single premise held to be non-negotiable: that a foreign government purchasing influence inside Australian democratic institutions is an existential threat to sovereignty that must be identified, resisted, and where possible prosecuted.

The Foreign Influence Transparency Scheme has never produced a public disclosure about AIJAC. The ASIO annual threat assessment has never named the Israeli lobby.

The parliamentary inquiries that ended Dastyari’s career and produced years of national debate have no equivalent examining the 500 politicians and journalists conditioned at Israeli government expense, the donor networks that instructed a foreign minister to recant international law, the Mossad spy cell that operated from Sydney for a decade using forged Australian documents, the foreign-government-funded quasi-diplomatic agencies embedded across Australian institutions, the lobby that pressured the national broadcaster to remove a journalist by WhatsApp, or the three premiers who suppressed political speech and peaceful assembly on behalf of a foreign government’s interests.

The apparatus constructed to protect Australian sovereignty from foreign purchase has one explicit, unwritten, never-debated, never-voted-upon exemption.

“Every senior person in Canberra knows what it is.“

They have calculated, morning after morning for thirty years, that acknowledging it is more dangerous to their careers than enabling it. That calculation is itself the evidence.

That is not a principled distinction between China and Israel. That is a purchased one. The receipt is in the parliamentary interests register. It is in Hansard. It is in Federal Court judgments.

It is in the published memoirs of a foreign minister who was told to be straightened out. It is in the Sydney Morning Herald report quoting a senior Australian national security official saying Israel has us by the balls because of the lobby.

The evidence does not need to be assembled. It has been sitting in plain sight for thirty years, in public documents, in published books, in court records and parliamentary transcripts.

A national emergency

The question is not whether it exists. The question is why a country with functioning democratic institutions and a free press has never once treated it as the national emergency it plainly is.

The evidence assembled across these two articles does not call for more journalism. It calls for a Royal Commission.

“A Royal Commission into Israeli foreign influence across all levels of Australian government.“

The terms of reference write themselves from the public record alone. The AIJAC trip program: who was taken, what they were shown, what positions they held on return, and what decisions they subsequently made on matters of direct relevance to Israeli government interests.

The donor networks: their documented intersection with foreign policy outcomes from the Gareth Evans threats of 1992 to the Bob Carr instruction of 2013.

The roles of the ECAJ, the ZFA, and the state Boards of Deputies as quasi-diplomatic agencies for a foreign government, in their own published words in their own publications.

The $164 million in security expenditure: the political process that produced it, why it was never subject to comparative public assessment against the security needs of other communities, and the decision-making chain that accelerated it after Bondi.

The Mossad operations: the decade-long spy cell based in Sydney, the assassination using forged Australian passports, the expelled diplomat whose removal the government tried to suppress, and the complete and deliberate absence of any proportionate response.

The instruction to Bob Carr: who issued it, under whose authority, whether it constituted improper interference in the sovereign conduct of Australian foreign policy, and who else received similar instructions and complied without ever recording it.

The three state premiers: who coordinated their legislative responses, what communications passed between them and lobby organisations, and whether those communications constitute evidence of foreign-government-aligned interference in state legislative processes.

The ABC: the chain of communications between Lawyers for Israel and ABC management in the Lattouf matter, who authorised the removal, and whether the ABC’s board was aware.

Jillian Segal powers

The Segal appointment: the process by which an active advocate for a foreign government’s interests was appointed to a quasi-regulatory role with the

“power to recommend the defunding of Australian cultural, academic, and media institutions.“

We held a Royal Commission into trade union governance. We held one into the banking sector. We are right now holding one into antisemitism, announced within weeks of a single event, with findings due within twelve months, and interim findings this week.

The question of whether a foreign government has, over thirty years, systematically purchased the compliance of Australian democratic institutions, usurped the conduct of Australian foreign policy, operated a state intelligence network on Australian soil using forged Australian documents to conduct murder abroad, corrupted the editorial independence of the national public broadcaster, and constructed a domestic legal and regulatory apparatus to protect its own conduct from Australian public scrutiny, is

“a question that dwarfs every Royal Commission this country has ever convened.”

If the answer is no, the inquiry will say so and the lobby will be vindicated. If the answer is yes, and the public record already indicates what the answer is, then every Australian citizen has been the victim of a fraud conducted against their democracy by a foreign power and its local agents, for thirty years, with the full knowledge and active participation of the people they elected to protect them.

Stated plainly

Something must be stated plainly before this piece closes. I have never held antisemitic views and I never will. My godparents were Jewish Hungarian Holocaust survivors.

My godfather went on to become a prominent and respected figure in both the Australian business world and the Jewish community. He was a founder of the Hakoah Club. I grew up with a precise and personal understanding of what antisemitism is, what it costs, and where it ends.

“This series is not a critique of Jewish Australians.“

It is a critique of something wholly different: the coercive scale of a foreign influence operation conducted on behalf of the Israeli government, by Australian citizens acting as its agents, against the democratic institutions of their own country.

Antisemitism weaponised

The lobby’s reflexive branding of any examination of its own institutional power as racial hatred of Jewish people is not a defence. It is the operational core of a suppression mechanism.

It has worked because it was designed to work and because too many people who knew exactly what it was decided that

“the personal cost of calling it out exceeded the democratic cost of ignoring it.“

That calculation has now produced the country documented in these two articles. Decide for yourself whether you can live with it.

For Netanyahu, crimes against humanity

On November 21, 2024, the International Criminal Court issued arrest warrants against Benjamin Netanyahu for war crimes and crimes against humanity. Australia is a signatory to the Rome Statute.

Canada said it would arrest him. France said it would arrest him. The Netherlands said it would arrest him. Albanese has said nothing of legal consequence.

He has not named what is happening in Gaza with the word the ICC has already used and the evidence demands. He has not imposed sanctions. He has not withdrawn the ambassador.

He has produced statements of such deliberate, crafted, lawyered vagueness that they constitute not diplomacy but performance: calibrated to suggest concern while guaranteeing inaction, designed not to communicate a position but to preserve the fiction of having one, while the donor network that purchased that silence continues to operate across every level of Australian government without scrutiny, without accountability, and

“without a single journalist in the parliamentary press gallery willing to stand up and call it what it is.”

That is not the restraint of a statesman navigating genuine complexity. That is the immobility of a man who knows the price of his position down to the last dollar, knows who set it, knows what the invoice covers, and has decided every morning for years that paying it is less dangerous than the alternative.

He is not alone.

He is the current representative of a thirty-year institutional posture shared by both major parties, dozens of ministers, three premiers, a national broadcaster, and a press gallery that has collectively decided the story is not worth the grief.

“Every one of them is wrong.“

And every Australian who still believes this country’s democratic institutions belong to its citizens, and not to the agents of a foreign power, should be demanding to know why.

Andrew Brown

Andrew Brown is a Sydney businessman in the health products sector, former Deputy Mayor of Mosman and Palestine peace activist

May 3, 2026 Posted by Christina Macpherson | politics | Leave a comment

Antisemitism and Israel: A challenge to the Australian narrative (Part 1)

UN Special Rapporteur Francesca Albanese has delivered the 21-page report, ‘Torture and genocide: Report of the Special Rapporteur on the situation of human rights in the Palestinian territories occupied since 1967’, dated 19 February 2026. Albanese’s team outline the depths of depravity and inhumanity to which the Israeli regime has now sunk in its attempted destruction of the Palestinian people.

By Evan Jones | 27 April 2026, https://independentaustralia.net/politics/politics-display/antisemitism-and-israel-a-challenge-to-the-australian-narrative,20974

A provocative Royal Commission submission by Dr Evan Jones argues that Australia’s antisemitism debate cannot be separated from Israel, Zionism and their political influence.

Submission to the Royal Commission on Antisemitism and Social Cohesion

Part 1

General

This submission can be reduced to one word — Israel.

There you have the answer to your inquiry. Dismantle apartheid Israel and see so-called “antisemitism” disappear overnight, save for a small ineradicable but prosecutable fringe

There is really no reason for this Royal Commission at all, as the problem is self-evident. The Commission will not solve the problem that it was formally established to resolve because its agenda is diversionary. Indeed, it will compound the problem because it will, in all probability (as it is seemingly intended to do), reinforce the influence of the Australian Zionist lobby and thus the ongoing impunity of Israel.

The problem arises from the conflation of two forces.

One: Israel is a nation founded on terrorism and wilfully sustained on deep-seated racism.

We know that nation-states are perennially born of violence, expropriation and repression (Australia as a case study), but Israel is a pronounced variation on a common colonialist theme. Israel was born of naked terrorism against an entire (non-Jewish) indigenous population. It was explicitly created and has been sustained as a racist apartheid state. Its borders have never been determined, envisaging ongoing expansion (lebensraum) — “from the river to the sea” (and beyond).

Palestinian Israelis (descendants of those whom the Zionist terrorist gangs failed to expel) are second-class citizens. Palestinian non-Israelis, under Occupation and under martial law, are denied the most basic human rights. Gaza has been a concentration camp since Sharon supposedly “disengaged” from Gaza in 2005.

The sadistic murder of Gazans since October 2023 is reminiscent of the Germans’ feverish pursuit of Jews and Bolsheviks after Operation Barbarossa in June 1941. Israel has long undermined United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA) personnel and facilities, which attempt to instil a modicum of humanity into a population long starving from Israeli blockages. Israel endorses carnage by fanatical settlers on West Bank Palestinians, murdering and destroying Palestinian livelihoods at will — for which they enjoy absolute immunity.

The Israel Defence Forces (IDF) murder children with pleasure. Children are imprisoned indefinitely for throwing stones. Adult prisoners are tortured and murdered. Israel wilfully murders foreign dignitaries (most recently, the Iranian National Security Council chief Ali Larijani, reputed “moderate” and skilled negotiator), which highlights that mass murderer Benjamin Netanyahu has put to words what has been the manifesto of all Israeli leadership: there will never be a Palestinian state (September 2025).

Long-term ethnic cleansing has now turned to genocide, ongoing in defiance of the formal “ceasefire”. Israel destroys essential infrastructure, murders aid workers and journalists — because it can. The journalist murder count is now further “totting up” in southern Lebanon.

Representative — this month (March 2026) marks the 23rd anniversary of the crushing of American Rachel Corrie by an Israeli bulldozer.

UN Special Rapporteur Francesca Albanese has delivered the 21-page report, ‘Torture and genocide: Report of the Special Rapporteur on the situation of human rights in the Palestinian territories occupied since 1967’, dated 19 February 2026. Albanese’s team outline the depths of depravity and inhumanity to which the Israeli regime has now sunk in its attempted destruction of the Palestinian people.

Some excerpts:

Torture has always been a central feature of Israel’s dispossession of Palestinians. Yet, since October 2023, Israel has employed it on a scale that suggests collective vengeance and destructive intent.

Torture is not confined to cells and interrogation rooms. Through the cumulative impact of mass displacement, siege, denial of aid and food, unrestrained military and settler violence and pervasive surveillance and terror, the occupied Palestinian territory (oPt) has become a space of collective punishment, where the destruction of the conditions of life turns genocidal violence into a tool of collective torture with long-term mental and physical consequences for the occupied population.

During its Mandate in Palestine, Britain used torture as one of the counterinsurgency tactics honed in Ireland and later imparted to Zionist militias; such practices, a colonial legacy, were then absorbed into the Israeli security apparatus before and after 1948 as a tool of repression and a preventive measure against Palestinian resistance. From early State-building and through decades of occupation, Israel has practised and condoned coercive violence as a structural component of its apparatus of domination.

An ecosystem of discriminatory legal frameworks and abusive operational practices has metastasized, encompassing Israeli military detention sites and prisons.

Since October 2023, torture in detention has, been used on an unprecedented scale as punitive collective vengeance — a clear feature of genocide. All Palestinians have been treated collectively as “terrorists” and “security threats”.

For her luminous competence, commitment and courage, Albanese was subject to comprehensive oppressive sanctions by the unhinged U.S. Trump Administration in July 2025.

Israel defies all international institutions and laws that proscribe the abuse of state power. Israel’s lobbying and propaganda regime (hasbara) is probably the most extensive of any state in history. Israeli authorities lie about the state’s forces’ actions without remorse.

The Israeli state is a parasite, receiving over US$300 billion (AU$418.7 billion) in aid from U.S. governments since 1950 (a great deal of which flows back to U.S. weapons manufacturers), supplemented by an estimated US$2 billion (AU$2.8 billion) per annum in donations from overseas Jewish “charities”, propped up at the country taxpayers’ expense. In particular, the Jewish National Fund directs funds to obliterating indigenous history in historic Palestine.

In short, the state of Israel is a pariah state, a barbaric regime, an abomination.

Two: All self-described “official” Jewish representative organisations in Australia support and lobby for Israel unreservedly. It is a full-time occupation. 

Such “representative” organisations oppose basic human rights for Palestinians under Israeli control. They socialise their children into “a love of Israel” in Jewish “faith” schools. Some of their children are currently enrolled with the IDF to kill Palestinians.

Such organisations lobby Australian governments to support Israel, inhibiting Australian governments from adopting a principled stance towards Israeli criminality. They harass media management and editorial, thus gaining privileged access to and biased coverage from media outlets that the public relies on for supposedly unbiased information and opinion. Their ridiculous defences of Israel (op-eds, letters, buying off journalists) are published with great regularity. Anti-Zionist Australian Jews (vide Louise Adler and so on) and their organisations (the recently formed Jewish Council of Australia) are pilloried, indeed “excommunicated”.

In essence, Australian Jewish “representative” organisations act as a fifth column for a foreign state against Australian national interests – naturally antagonistic to ‘social cohesion’.

One and two in combination.

The Australian Jewish community, by virtue of its “official” representatives, courageous dissenters excepted, is complicit in Israeli genocide. And not just passively but actively. There has been no mea culpa on the part of executives of the key Jewish organisations (such as ECAJ, ZFA, AIJAC). Nobody in the Jewish community that underpins these organisations has sought to overturn the leadership of these key organisations in order to reorient their agenda and priorities.

In short, Israel and the “official” Australian Jewish community are joined at the hip.

It is not unrealistic to infer that the Bondi attack (and multiple incidents simply labelled “antisemitic”) is blowback for Israel’s character and actions and its local support network. The Israeli machine thus puts the security of global Jewry at risk (indeed, its own Jewish population) and doesn’t care.

A Zionist foot soldier is published in The Sydney Morning Herald (22 March), in denial regarding the intimate connection:

‘While David Leser’s article (SMH & Melbourne Age, 20 March [2026]) raises some thought-provoking points, it falls into the trap of attributing antisemitism in Australia to the actions of the Israeli Government. No other national or ethnic group in Australia is held to account for the actions of governments in countries overseas. So why is it considered reasonable for Jews in Australia to be relentlessly discriminated against for the actions of the Netanyahu Government?’

After the Bondi Beach murders, Israeli flags were well represented among the flower collections and mourners. Israel is apparently seen as the mother ship, the source of solace for those suffering, yet it is the ultimate cause of that suffering.

This bizarre anomaly is enhanced when the Zionist Federation of Australia (as befits its name) initiated the idea of inviting the Israeli President, Isaac Herzog, to Australia, subsequently legitimised and authorised by Prime Minister Anthony Albanese and dragging the Governor-General into the sordid process.

Another foot soldier grasps the connection but declines to understand the implications (SMH, 9 January 2026):

‘President Herzog is the legitimate head of state of the internationally recognised democratic state of Israel, rightfully invited to commiserate with Australians after the appalling terrorist atrocity at Bondi, in which predominantly Jewish people were murdered and injured.’

One notes in passing that Israel is not a democracy but an ethnocracy — no amount of affirmation is going to change the lie and the blind spot in the letter writer’s eye. To repeat, Israel is apparently seen as the mother ship, the source of solace for those suffering, yet it is the ultimate cause of that suffering. ‘Rightfully invited’ — really?

Herzog is not a passive head of state but an active participant in Israeli barbarism. Herzog comes to Australia, spends a token moment with victim families and survivors, declines to visit the fire-bombed Orthodox (non-Zionist) Adass Israel synagogue (“for reasons of security”) and spends the bulk of his time playing Israeli politician (‘not the time for a two-state solution’, meets with ASIO and so on).  

The implication is ugly. Those murdered at Bondi are being instrumentalised (as with Netanyahu’s treatment of Hamas’ Israeli hostages) in the defence of the state of Israel and its current genocidal agenda. Appalling, no?

May 1, 2026 Posted by Christina Macpherson | politics | Leave a comment

Antisemitism and Israel: A challenge to the Australian narrative (Part 2)

By Evan Jones | 27 April 2026, https://independentaustralia.net/politics/politics-display/antisemitism-and-israel-a-challenge-to-the-australian-narrative,20974

Part 2

The Commission’s Terms of Reference

‘AND the determination of the Australian Government to respond to the attack, and the factors leading up to the attack, as a matter of urgency by addressing antisemitism within the Australian community, including since 7 October 2023.’

Investigating the factors leading up to the attack could and should have been the responsibility of the mooted and more suited Richardson review. A royal commission is not the most appropriate vehicle towards this end.

Any investigation regarding “antisemitism” in Australia has to put Israel front and centre. The “official” Jewish community, AKA the Zionist lobby, naturally wants to exclude it.

The appalling Segal Report contains no substantive reference to Israel (my dissection here and here), thus being not merely worthless but disingenuous (vide Gwenaël Velge’s summary of the counter-Segal Greenslade and Briskman report, Not in Our Name: Jewish Australians Speak Out) and dangerous. Ditto the absence of any substantive reference to Israel in the most recent annual report (December 2025) of the Executive Council of Australian Jewry (sic) (dissected here).

‘AND that the Australian Government has adopted the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s working definition of antisemitism.’

This submitter is frankly gobsmacked to find that this fraudulent “definition” has been officially adopted. The definition has been widely criticised, including by one of its originators, Kenneth Stern. The International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) definition is essentially about demonising criticism of Israel. Any proposed definition of antisemitism that attempts to delineate the terms on which one is allowed to criticise Israel without censure is automatically illegitimate.

The adoption of the IHRA definition nullifies any legitimacy that the paraphernalia of a royal commission might have and destroys any prospect of an honest analysis and a substantive functional prognosis. This adoption of the IHRA definition gives the impression that the Royal Commission, even inadvertently, will serve as yet another front for the pro-Israel lobby.

With the Royal Commission proceeding based on the IHRA definition, it can only turn into an inquisition. It can have nothing intelligent or ethical to offer about real antisemitism and can have nothing to offer in terms of genuinely dealing with it. It will be remembered as a squandering of the significant money that funds it and for the farcical theatre that is its essence.

‘AND recognising that strengthening the national consensus in support of democracy, freedom and the rule of law (social cohesion) provides the strongest defence against antisemitism and other forms of religious and ideologically motivated extremism.’

This sentence reads like it was written by AI. Who wrote this rubbish? One cannot have social cohesion as long as a particular Australian community coheres and operates actively as a fifth column in support of a foreign rogue state and influences Australian politics, both foreign and domestic, and media towards that end.

AND that hearing from the Jewish Australian community will be important to informing the recommendations of your inquiry and recognising concerns relating to educational and cultural institutions, and other sections of Australian society.’

Which ‘Jewish Australian community’? Is this obscurantism a product of naivete or of cynical contempt? Is the pro-Israel lobby running this show? Will anti-Zionist Jews and their organisations be consulted? Will anti-Zionist non-Jewish organisations (which have Jewish membership), such as the Australia Palestine Advocacy Network, be consulted?

‘…and recognising concerns relating to educational and cultural institutions…’ Meaning? Which and whose concerns? Is this an oblique reference to forthcoming censorship, sackings, institutional defunding and hasbara implants as foreshadowed in the Segal Report?

To the Honourable Virginia Bell AC

We do… appoint you to be a Commission of inquiry, and require and authorise you to inquire into the following matters:

(a) tackling antisemitism by:…

This section is at the heart of the Commission’s Terms of Reference misdirection. Misdiagnosed symptoms are highlighted rather than causes.

The authorities need to cut the umbilical cord between the Australian Jewish community (including demolishing the pernicious influence of its Zionist leadership) and the criminal state of Israel.

In particular, (a)(iv) deserves comment. The ‘mental health and wellbeing of Jewish Australians’? No doubt the Commission hearings will consider the mental health of anti-Zionist Australian Jews who experience the mental anguish of seeing Jewish Israelis acting like Nazis (and supposedly in the name of global Jewry), but who also suffer the obloquy of abuse by the Australian Zionist Jewish establishment for their ethical stance.

As for the mental health of Australian Zionist Jews, tied inexplicably to a racially supremacist Israel, it is a psychopathology and to their own account — save that their aberrant mental state has the Palestinians (and now the Iranians and, once again, the Lebanese) as its ongoing victims.

Zionist Jewish University students, fresh from their “faith” schools with their “love of Israel” and now nurtured in the bosom of the Zionist Australasian Union of Jewish Students, find their “sensitivities” affected by campus protests against Israeli genocide. So as not to upset these sensitive souls, inured to the genocide of lesser ethnicities, campus protests have to be shut down.

If the Commission is concerned with shoring up the ‘mental health and wellbeing of [Zionist] Jewish Australians’, it is not an agenda that any Australian imbued with ethical sympathies (which includes anti-Zionist Jewish Australians) could have any tolerance for.

‘(b) making any recommendations to assist law enforcement, border control, immigration and security agencies…’

Is this code for inhibiting access to refugee status of people escaping Israeli onslaughts and who naturally take a dim view of Israel’s modus operandi?

‘(c) examine the circumstances surrounding the antisemitic Bondi terrorist attack…’

This was supposed to be the focus of the Richardson review, but that was merged inappropriately into the Royal Commission’s framework. Now Richardson has retired, recognising the Commission’s structured dysfunctionality. The most important subject for investigation is now without a suitable home and personnel to proceed.

‘(d) make any other recommendations… that would contribute to strengthening social cohesion…’

The means to strengthening social cohesion is to dismantle the pro-Israel lobby in Australia and for the Albanese Government to develop and sustain a principled foreign policy. By contrast, the Terms of Reference of this Commission appear to direct the Commission’s operations to enhance that lobby’s influence and to ignore and to implicitly condone the Government’s cowardice.

Methinks that the Royal Commission’s slip is showing. One gets the strong impression that one is in for more than farce. Rather, the Australian public is in for an authoritarian state run in the interests of an Australian Zionist mafia, with which the current Australian Labor Government is already in cahoots (and the Liberal Opposition even more craven).

May 1, 2026 Posted by Christina Macpherson | politics | Leave a comment

From Welfare to War: Following the 2007 Money Trail

25 April 2026 Michael Taylor, https://theaimn.net/from-welfare-to-war-following-the-2007-money-trail/

Many social media articles lately push a familiar argument: as defence spending rises, government services fall behind. The more we allocate to the military, the more strain we place on the systems people rely on every day.

There’s nothing new about that trade-off.

I was reminded of a revealing example from the Iraq War era – one that says as much about honesty in government as it does about priorities.

The story began with the “Welfare to Work” (WtW) program introduced by the Howard government in 2005. Its stated aim was to increase workforce participation among single parents, people with disabilities, and older unemployed Australians. The policy details matter less than what came next.

For some time, WtW attracted little attention. That changed in March 2007 – an election year, and a moment when the government needed good news. Suddenly, the program was being promoted as a success.

Joe Hockey, then Employment Minister, pointed to what he described as a $500 million “budget surprise,” attributing it to falling numbers of people receiving income support. The implication was clear: welfare reform was working, and fewer Australians needed assistance.

But the numbers told a different story.

Disability Support Pension (DSP) figures for the period at the time showed:

• 2006: 712,163
• 2007: 714,156
• 2008: 732,367

These were not declining figures. They were rising.

So where did the supposed $500 million saving come from?

Contemporaneous accounts from within the Department of Employment and Workplace Relations suggest that “savings” of this kind were not simply the by-product of policy success. Rather, departments were under pressure to identify substantial reductions in projected spending – figures that did not always align neatly with underlying demand.

In practical terms, that meant looking for money that could be reclassified, deferred, or absorbed elsewhere. The distinction matters. On paper, it looks like efficiency. In reality, it can amount to something closer to accounting necessity.

What can be said with confidence is this: the demand for support did not fall in the way the government claimed. Yet a saving was still found.

The question then becomes: why?

In February 2007, U.S. Vice President Dick Cheney visited Australia. Shortly afterwards, Prime Minister John Howard committed additional Australian support to the war in Iraq, including logistics personnel and army trainers.

The timing is difficult to ignore.

Governments do not operate in silos. Budgetary decisions in one area are often shaped by pressures in another, even if those connections are never made explicit. What is presented publicly as a policy dividend can, in practice, reflect shifting priorities behind closed doors.

Around the same period, heightened national security messaging helped frame the broader political environment – reinforcing the sense that defence spending was not just necessary, but urgent.

None of this requires speculation to be troubling.

The numbers didn’t move the way the government said they did. The narrative, however, did.

And once a narrative takes hold – particularly in an election year – it can be remarkably effective at obscuring the more complicated truth beneath it.

Once upon a time, “lying and contempt” were accusations reserved for one side of politics. These days, it’s harder to pretend they belong to any one party alone.

April 29, 2026 Posted by Christina Macpherson | politics | Leave a comment