Senior naval officer facing court martial over naval contracts – breaking news from WA
Defence accused of trying to bury details of a high-level investigation into handling of lucrative naval defence contracts by a former senior naval figure
Michelle Fahy, Jul 21, 2026, https://undueinfluence.substack.com/p/senior-naval-officer-facing-court?utm_source=post-email-title&publication_id=297295&post_id=207838287&utm_campaign=email-post-title&isFreemail=true&r=1ise1&triedRedirect=true&utm_medium=email
A secretive court martial process is under way in Western Australia involving a recently retired officer, The Nightly’s Andrew Greene has reported.
The Nightly said it understands the accused had left the Australian Defence Force in the past few years and will soon be subjected to a court martial on eight separate but unspecified charges.
Former senior Defence official Michael Shoebridge said he believes the entire process should be handled by a regular civil court, rather than kept inside the military justice system.
“The alleged offences are probably also offences under civilian law, so the better approach is a standard — open and public — prosecution in a civil court,” Shoebridge told The Nightly. “Instead, this just looks like the Defence leadership and ministers trying to keep this away from the public.”
Another defence industry figure familiar with details of the case backed the assessment, telling The Nightly they believed the military establishment was trying to “bury” the case from public view.
Figures familiar with the allegations have told The Nightly that due to the seniority of the accused ADF member it was initially difficult to find senior officers to take part in the court martial who were not conflicted.
Those figures told The Nightly the complex case will also examine interactions between the government weapons-buying group – Capability and Sustainment Group (CASG) – and several large companies who completed sustainment projects at Henderson shipyard.
The Nightly said it understands the activity under investigation occurred during the previous Coalition government and before the Albanese government took power in 2022.
It is unclear why the matter is being handled by a military disciplinary process rather than a civilian court.
Read The Nightly’s full story here.
The Forgotten Jewish Movement That Rejected Zionism.
By Nadege Bizimungu, The Tea with Myriam François, Jul 21, 2026
Jewish mass movement that rejected the idea of a Jewish state ever existing was, for much of its history, more popular than Zionism. Here’s why almost nobody has heard of it.
Poland in the 1930s had the largest Jewish population in Europe, and the single most popular party among Jewish voters there wasn’t Zionist. It didn’t want a Jewish state at all.
It ran schools, published newspapers and even organized armed militias to defend Jewish communities. According to an analysis of Bund election results published in the Yiddish studies journal In geveb, the party won roughly 38 percent of the vote for Jewish parties in the last Polish municipal elections before the war, more than any single Zionist party, though the combined Zionist lists narrowly edged it out overall. Its members were fiercely opposed to Zionism and thought it was a fantasy, and they said so bluntly and often.
That party was the Jewish Labour Bund. Today, few people know its name, but at its peak it was one of the most important Jewish political movements in Europe. Its existence challenges a common idea about Jewish history: that Zionism was the only response to antisemitism. For decades, millions of Jews supported a different vision. They believed the answer was not a new country, but fighting for equality where Jews already lived.
The Bund was founded in October 1897, when thirteen young Jewish Marxists met secretly in an attic in Vilna, then part of the Russian Empire. That’s the same year Theodor Herzl convened the first Zionist Congress in Basel. Zionism argued that Jewish safety required leaving Europe and building a state. The Bund argued the opposite: stay, and fight for equality where Jews already lived, in solidarity with non-Jewish workers and socialist movements. The Yiddish word for this was doikayt, “hereness,” and it rejected the idea that Jewish life needed a single homeland at all.
The party grew fast, and contemporaries noticed. The Menshevik theorist Georgi Plekhanov reportedly called Jewish workers “the vanguard of the labor army in Russia.” Historian Bertram Wolfe later described the Bund as the largest and best organized body of workingmen inside the Russian empire. By 1906 its membership had reportedly reached around 40,000, briefly making it the biggest socialist organization in the empire, and by interwar Poland it had built an entire subculture: youth movements, sports clubs, a network of secular Yiddish schools. Jack Jacobs’s research on the interwar Bund treats it as a genuine mass institution, not a fringe faction.
None of this was naive pacifism. Bund militias organized armed self-defense against pogroms and antisemitic gangs on the streets of interwar Warsaw, decades before “Jewish strength” became coded as an Israeli idea. When the Nazis invaded, Bundists fought in the 1943 Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, the first urban revolt against Nazi occupation anywhere in Europe. One of its fighters, a Bundist teenager named Lusiek Blones, was thirteen years old.
The rivalry between Bundists and Zionists ran deep, and it was rooted in a real disagreement about what antisemitism demanded of Jews. Bundists argued that if European governments were insisting Jews were foreign and should leave, then Zionism, by proposing that Jews do exactly that, was conceding the antisemites’ premise rather than refuting it. Zionists saw it differently: as a response to the repeated failure of emancipation and assimilation to protect Jews anywhere in the diaspora. After the 1917 Balfour Declaration, in which Britain backed a Jewish “national home” in Palestine, Bundists increasingly viewed Zionism as bound up with imperial power rather than freed from it, a colonial project underwritten by the same empires that had failed to protect Jews in the first place.
The Bund wasn’t beaten in that argument, though. It was murdered. The Holocaust wiped out the working-class Jewish communities that had sustained the party for half a century. Historian David Slucki has documented how the postwar Bund never came close to rebuilding its prewar scale, plateauing at just a few thousand members worldwide by the late 1950s. Daniel Blatman’s research on the Bund’s final years in Poland, from 1939 to 1949, traces a parallel political defeat: Stalinist repression, including the 1942 murder of Bundist leaders Henryk Erlich and Victor Alter by Soviet secret police, finished what the Nazis had started.
Zionist institutions in Palestine, meanwhile, survived the war intact. In her new book, Here Where We Live Is Our Country, artist and journalist Molly Crabapple, whose account of the Bund this piece draws heavily on, argues that Zionist organizations controlled much of the rations, housing, and paperwork in the displaced-persons camps after the war, and used that leverage to funnel traumatized survivors toward Palestine. A movement with no population left to organize couldn’t compete with one that still had territory, infrastructure, and international backing behind it.
That imbalance is also why the Bund disappeared from memory rather than from relevance. It lost its people, not its argument, and a movement without survivors to carry its institutions forward simply stops being written about, no matter how large it once was.
The premise Zionism was built on, that Jewish safety requires a Jewish ethnostate, is now facing its sharpest public challenge in decades. Nearly three years into Israel’s war on Gaza, which the UN and earlier findings from Amnesty International and the International Association of Genocide Scholars, have described as genocide, support for Israel has fallen sharply, including among Jews themselves. Younger American Jews are significantly less likely than older generations to see support for Israel as central to Jewish identity, while nearly half of American Jews under 35 now say they would support a single binational state with equal rights for Israelis and Palestinians. In Britain, young Jews who identify as anti-Zionist or non-Zionist now roughly match those who identify as Zionist.Israeli historian Ilan Pappé, a longtime critic of his own government, has called this the “beginning of the end of the Zionist project,” pointing to internal political fracture, international isolation, and economic strain as evidence.
For Crabapple, this shift is also personal. She spent seven years writing Here Where We Live Is Our Country, much of it while Israel’s campaign in Gaza was underway. in an interview on Democracy Now!, she said there was something almost unbearable about reconstructing the destruction of Warsaw’s Jews while watching a country invoke the Holocaust to justify what was happening in Gaza. “It broke me,” she said, “in probably ways that I have difficulty expressing.”
What this history suggests, isn’t a clean answer to the hardest questions about what a just political future looks like after decades of occupation and violence. It’s something narrower, and maybe more useful: proof that at the exact moment Jewish nationalism was taking shape, a mass, organized, genuinely popular Jewish movement existed that rejected the idea that Jewish liberation had to come at another people’s dispossession. It didn’t lose that argument. It was destroyed by fascism, the Holocaust, and Stalinist repression, and its ideas went down with it, not because they were wrong, but because there was no one left alive to keep making the case.
Ceases to be a nuclear power’: The high-stakes deal the new UK PM inherits
SBS News, 21 July 2026 By Yasmine Alwakal
Andy Burnham has inherited a major AUKUS commitment with Australia. Whether Britain can deliver it is another question
IN BRIEF
- On Monday, former Manchester mayor Andy Burnham succeeded Keir Starmer as the United Kingdom’s prime minister.
- Experts say the change in leadership could impact the UK’s investment in defence but is unlikely to impact AUKUS.
Labour leader Andy Burnham has become the United Kingdom’s seventh prime minister in a decade — but experts say it remains unclear how the former mayor of Greater Manchester will approach the country’s most important strategic partnership with Australia.
Newly departed UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer suffered a high-profile split with his defence secretary, John Healey, over a perceived failure to properly fund the department.
Burnham now inherits Starmer’s £298bn ($573b) defence spending commitment over the next four years, £4.7b ($9b) of which is unfunded and will need to make up part of Burnham’s first budget.
Experts have said that, while Burnham is unlikely to renegotiate the AUKUS agreement, defence is likely to play a central position in the new UK leader’s job description, given the growing threat of Russia to NATO members.
Jennifer Parker, a non-resident fellow at the Lowy Institute, told SBS News that policymakers in Australia will be watching Burnham’s approach to foreign affairs closely.
“I think there are broader questions about the implications of Andy Burnham’s views on defence and the defence investment plan in the UK … [but] in many ways, AUKUS is critical for the UK,” Parker told SBS News.
The UK, alongside Australia and the United States, entered into trilateral AUKUS security agreement in 2021.
The deal is divided into two key pillars: Australia’s acquisition of conventionally-armed, nuclear-powered submarine capability and the development and delivery of advanced capabilities such as underwater drones.
In July 2025, Australia also entered into a bilateral agreement with the UK dubbed the Geelong Treaty. The 50-year agreement enables the cooperative design, building, operation, sustainment, and disposal of nuclear-powered submarines known as SSN.
Will Burnham deliver on the UK’s AUKUS commitments?
Since 1968, the UK has been a member of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty and is recognised as one of the five permanent members of the United Nations Security Council.
Parker said since the end of the Cold War the UK has operated ballistic missile submarines called SSBNs:
“Now, you need to have SSN’s — attack submarines — to be able to protect your ballistic missile submarines. AUKUS, for the UK makes designing, building and operating SSN’s cheaper. So, it makes it easier.”
That’s why she believes the UK, whether led by current UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer or the incoming Burnham, will continue to uphold its AUKUS commitments.
“If the UK can’t achieve AUKUS … the long-term impact is quite significant in terms of the UK ceases to be a nuclear weapons power. Which really changes its global status.”
According to the Australian government, the UK will deliver its first SSN’s by the late 2030s. Defence Minister Richard Marles said the first class of Australian-built submarines is intended to enter service by the early 2040s…………………………………………………………………..
Parker from the Lowy Institute also believes the Australian government will watch to see if the UK takes “strides” to address what she described as capability constraints facing UK submarine industrial bases………….
“As much as I’m confident they’ll make it [AUKUS] work, whether they’ll make it work within the stated time frames is genuinely an open question.”
The UK’s defence committee has launched an inquiry into its military resilience and preparedness. It follows a July report by its defence ministry, which found that 47 out of 49 major defence projects in the UK were delayed or over budget.
In a statement, Dan Jarvis, the newly appointed defence secretary, said:
“Many projects had been announced with insufficient or no funding at all. The consequences were profound: limited availability of warships and aircraft, an army facing a recruitment crisis, morale weakened and renewal of our nuclear deterrent delayed.” https://www.sbs.com.au/news/article/andy-burnham-aukus-submarine-deal-australia/j38e9qzzf
AUKUS Safety plan?
Robyn Wood, 17 July 26
The Advertiser editor says that AUKUS must be embraced by all (Editorial Advertiser 17.7.26). This could possibly be easier if the state and federal government actually released emergency and safety plans should there be a nuclear accident or terrorist attack involving the AUKUS nuclear submarines. Instead we are told they will be developed at some stage down the track. Hardly reassuring.
‘Height of unfairness’: Former SA senator slams government over AUKUS nuclear waste move
Adrian Zorzut 15 July 26, https://www.news.com.au/technology/innovation/military/height-of-unfairness-former-sa-senator-slams-government-over-aukus-nuclear-waste-move/news-story/1cfe188f41d9b5530b81e065a4656ebc
The government has an AUKUS program, which they also have to justify to the Australian public but also that they have thought about and have a proper proposal to deal with the waste that will inevitably come from that program. And we know these sorts of topics are controversial. The government needs to gain a social licence and secrecy is not the way to do that,”
As plans to develop nuclear submarines under the AUKUS deal move ahead, the government is being coy about where they’re going to dump nuclear waste.
A former South Australian senator has slammed the federal government for refusing to release information about potential storage sites for nuclear waste that comes from AUKUS submarines.
Rex Patrick said the Australian public had a right to know where hazardous spent fuel from nuclear-powered submarines will be buried and shot down claims the information was a national security secret.
The former submariner turned politician is now considering taking the government to court after they refused three Freedom of Information (FoI) requests.
Mr Patrick wants Canberra to disclose the cost and potential locations for a storage facility as well as a cabinet report on this topic.
“Sensitive is not a ground for exemption. There is no military sensitivity in the storage of nuclear waste. Information about the submarines themselves will potentially attract a national security exemption, but the waste that comes from them has nothing to do with engaging in conflict or defending the country,” he told news.com.au.
“It’s incidental to the project but obviously a significant problem that needs to be addressed. It’s not like someone can build a facility in complete secrecy.”
Mr Patrick, who was an independent SA senator between 2017 and 2022, partially won a court order to cap maximum legal costs he’d have to pay if he lost an appeal against the government to $20,000. Without the cap, the former senator claims he’d face a legal bill of up to $150,000.
Handing down his finding on Monday, July 13, federal court judge O’Sullivan said the information Mr Rex’s was seeking was “a matter of significant public interest,” but stopped short of the senator’s request for a $5,000 cap on legal expenses, a copy of the judgement shows.
Mr Patrick wants to fundraise the cash but said there is no point unless he has a shot of winning his case in court and is consulting with a lawyer on what to do next.
“I’m not in the court to run litigation needlessly. I’m focused on the document and now I need to react,” he said.
‘There will be a cost’
Mr Patrick said he lodged a FoI request for a cabinet report on potential storage sites, which was knocked back by the government and the Administration Review Tribunal (ART) – a watchdog for administrative decisions made by government ministers.
The former parliamentarian plans to appeal and claims the sections of the report he is seeking are not exempt from Freedom of Information laws and are of tantamount interest to the public.
He is also separately challenging a successful appeal by the government to stop the release of other related paperwork he was due.
He claims the government wants him to cover up to $150,000 in its legal fees if he loses.
Mr Patrick won an ART decision in May to access the paperwork which helped develop the cabinet report. The government immediately appealed the decision. The parties are expected to battle it out in court.
“That’s an awful situation for me and for you as a journalist. To win an FoI in a tribunal and have the government appeal it and say if you don’t win this, you will be charged $150,000. I think that is the height of unfairness from the government,” he said.
“The whole point of the FoI regime is to allow people to get access to information, to participate in democracy, to scrutinise the government and what this does is signal that if you win, there will be a cost.”
A spokesperson from the Department of Industry, Science and Resources told news.com.au, “As this matter is before the court it would not be appropriate to comment.”
This month, Jacqui Lambie, Pauline Hanson and David Pocock were just some of 18 independent and minor-party members to pen a letter urging Attorney-General Michelle Rowland to intervene in the public interest.
“It is clear to us that this is an attack on our freedom-of-information regime, with the intent of deterring Australians from pursuing access to information,” they said, according to The Guardian.
“Dragging an ordinary citizen, self-represented and under threat of costs, to argue questions of law raised by the government is most unfair.”
Mr Patrick said a third FoI request is before the Information Commissioner. Mr Patrick submitted a request for the latest cost estimates for a facility with the Australian Submarine Agency but was told they couldn’t find them – a response he said was an “extraordinary situation” for an organisation that is supposed to cost projects from cradle to grave, a submission to an independent inquiry into AUKUS shows.
Mr Patrick said he believes an underground storage facility could cost “billions” to build and up to $30m a year to maintain.
‘Nothing stopping the PM’
Mr Patrick, who calls himself a transparency warrior, said the documents were a “significant public policy interest”.
“The government governs for us. The government has an AUKUS program, which they also have to justify to the Australian public but also that they have thought about and have a proper proposal to deal with the waste that will inevitably come from that program. And we know these sorts of topics are controversial. The government needs to gain a social licence and secrecy is not the way to do that,” he said.
The former submariner suggested because a storage facility isn’t needed until a nuclear-powered submarine is nearing decommissioning, the government is refusing to make a decision or release information. The average lifespan of a nuclear sub is 33 years, he said.
Mr Patrick added at least one site is needed to bury spent fuel and the decommissioned reactor inside the submarine. He said reactor components are generally buried in a shallow facility while spent fuel needs cooling before it is buried deep underground.
“These are politically-sensitive and emotional issues that the government is seeking to kick down the road, possibly to a time period where they’re not even in power,” he said.
“The government just really doesn’t want to deal with this publicly because it’s a politically controversial topic.”
Mr Patrick is calling on Prime Minister Anthony Albanese to release the cabinet report, which the government is claiming to be exempt from FoI laws.
“Even if the document is a cabinet document, there is nothing stopping the prime minister from releasing it and the prime minister is at liberty to do that and he hasn’t.”
The Department of Industry, Science and Resources, the Prime Minister’s Office and the Australian Submarine Agency have been contacted for comment.
Royal Commission or Lobby Show? | The West Report.
The Royal Commission into anti-Semitism has a problem: it is not credible.
The evidence is not being tested. Instead, it has descended into a storytelling farce about hurt feelings, while the data shows Muslim and Arab hate is worse than Jewish hate in Australia — in many cases, not all.
Why Australia’s new office marks a turning point for AI governance
15 July 2026 , RMIT University, https://theaimn.net/why-australias-new-office-marks-a-turning-point-for-ai-governance/
The Federal Government has today announced a new Office of AI within the Department of the Prime Minister and Cabinet, alongside plans for a national artificial intelligence framework. An RMIT expert says this stronger oversight of the rapidly evolving technology is a welcome step.
Lisa Given, Distinguished Professor of Information Sciences
“As technology companies increasingly look to build data centres in Australia, communities have expressed significant concerns about energy and water use, and placement near residential neighbourhoods.
“Australians are also worried about disruption from AI technologies, raising concerns about potential job losses, copyright infringements of material used to train AI models, and data privacy.
“Addressing such varied challenges, particularly when AI technologies are evolving at such a fast pace, warrants the coordinated approach this office will take.
“Given the known risks posed by generative AI technologies like deepfake images that mislead customers or hallucinated content that misinforms chatbot users – Australians need government intervention to protect them from harm.
“The creation of this office marks a significant shift in the government’s overall approach to governing AI, towards being more hands-on and proactive.
“In 2024, the government planned to regulate high-risk AI implementation, which was later abandoned. It also proposed – and then paused – digital duty of care legislation, to hold technology companies to account for harmful content and tool designs.
“By creating this office, and reintroducing digital duty of care legislation this year, the government has recognised the need for coordination and intervention to address the varied risks posed by AI, while also supporting its potential benefits.”
Lisa Given is a Distinguished Professor of Information Sciences at RMIT University. She is director of RMIT’s Centre for Human-AI Information Environments and the Social Change Enabling Impact Platform
Antisemitic, really? Jewish leader speaks out on Royal Commission hypocrisy
by Jeffrey Loewenstein | Jul 14, 2026, https://michaelwest.com.au/antisemitic-really-jewish-leader-speaks-out-on-royal-commission-hypocrisy/ |
Were the ‘attacks’ described really attacks of an antisemitic nature,The tide has turned a little at the Royal Commission into Antisemitism with a second Jewish witness breaking from the Israel narrative. Jeffrey Loewenstein reports.
Sarah Schwartz, co-founder of the Jewish Council of Australia (JCA), gave evidence at the Royal Commission into Anti-Semitism and Social Cohesion last week.
I venture to suggest that it will come to be seen that Schwartz gave seminal evidence which the Commissioner is going to find hard to ignore when she is writing her report; evidence supported yesterday by the compelling testimony of Jewish university peace activist Yasmine Johnson.
Until Schwartz gave her evidence, we had seen testimonies given by members of the Jewish community – some of which can only be described as very troubling in terms of evidence – which sometimes bordered on hysterical.
But, the elephant in the room?
Sarah Schwartz, co-founder of the Jewish Council of Australia (JCA), gave evidence at the Royal Commission into Anti-Semitism and Social Cohesion last week.
I venture to suggest that it will come to be seen that Schwartz gave seminal evidence which the Commissioner is going to find hard to ignore when she is writing her report; evidence supported yesterday by the compelling testimony of Jewish university peace activist Yasmine Johnson.
Until Schwartz gave her evidence, we had seen testimonies given by members of the Jewish community – some of which can only be described as very troubling in terms of evidence – which sometimes bordered on hysterical.
But, the elephant in the room?
“Were the ‘attacks’ described really attacks of an antisemitic nature,”
or were they people venting their anger and outrage at Jews seen to be rusted-on, unquestioning supporters of Israel’s egregious actions in Gaza?
Take the example of a uni student in Canberra who just yesterday was reported in the Nine media thus: ”Liat told the Commission she had felt “very physically unsafe” during the long encampment at her university campus … when people would laugh and leer at me and say, ‘Look at the baby killer, look at the genocide supporter’”.
No, that is not pleasant, but the fact is – a fact unchallenged aside from the state of Israel itself and the likes of the ECAJ in Australia – that more than 20,000 Palestinian children have been killed by the state of Israel and more than 44,000 injured since October 2023.
Why the rise in antisemitism?
What was more than significant, is that many of those who gave evidence of alleged antisemitism demonstrated absolutely no introspection. Why had there been a rise in anti-semitism sinceOctober 7?
Not because Hamas attacked Israel. No, it was, in many cases people showing their anger, yes, in some instances in a totally misguided way, at Israel’s actions in Gaza. Why did some 300,000 people from all walks of life and all ages, march across the Sydney Harbour Bridge on a foul, wet and windy day?
The palpable anger by a significant part of the Australian community, including many Jews, at what Israel did in Gaza, and continues to do to this day, is reflected in the sober evidence given at the Royal Commission yesterday by Yasmine Johnson, a co-convener for Students for Palestine and a protest organiser.
Following her evidence, Johnson, who is Jewish, told the media
“the idea that campus protests “create a dangerous atmosphere, fear for people, is farcical”.
Antisemitism, anti-genocide conflation
“What we’ve heard,” she said “so far is day after day after day of evidence which conflates legitimate anti-genocide, pro-Palestine activism with genuine antisemitism which exists in our society.”
The earlier mentioned witness Liat, and others like her, may feel uncomfortable about what is being shouted out at her as much as she probably sees posters like ‘Free Palestine’ as confronting and antisemitic, but has Liat – who acts as a spokesperson for the Australasian Union of Jewish Students – either personally or on behalf of her organisation ever publicly accused Israel of being responsible for war crimes in Gaza, even if not genocide? Almost certainly, not!
And that is the rub.
Might this alleged antisemitism just have had something to do with Jews so visibly parading around with Israeli flags draped acrosss their shoulders, waving Israelis flags at solidarity rallies for Israel, Jewish communal leaders excoriating those who called out Israel for engaging in genocide or starving children, and welcoming the Israeli President as their “national leader” ?
“Really? I thought we were Australians.”
The “average” person could be forgiven for concluding that members of the Jewish community were demonstrating that they identified with and supported Israel.
The question to be asked here is why it is that criticising Israel by Jews is said to make the speaker a self-hating Jew, a “kapo” a “Judenrat” or, as in the case of Schwartz, to even be accused on ABC Radio National as being ‘anti Jewish?”
They are shameful, offensive and disgraceful epithets. They are intended to be so.
Not be ignored in the above is that the likes of a Mark Leibler, the ECAJ, AIJAC, the Zionist Federation of Australia and similar groups see Jews who criticise Israel as a no-go area even if they, falsely, assert that Jews are free to openly express their views about Israel. It’s simply untrue!
There is the expectation from these quarters that all Jews will, as a matter of solidarity, support Israel as the Zionist/Jewish homeland. With this forked-tongue and double-speak it is no wonder that the sort of slurs and insults which Schwartz described at the Royal Commission are rife in the Jewish community.
A climate of fear
Conversely, those in the Jewish community who might otherwise speak out against Israel fear that they will be subjected to all manner of insults and even the break-down of family relationships.
Given the airing of Schwartz’s evidence, one has to also wonder why there has been total silence from the usually vocal Jewish organisations. Should they not be publicly calling out vilification of fellow-Jews, calling for vilification to be stopped and asking for respect for those Jews who are not Zionists, strident or not.
Proof of the “attitude” in the Jewish community to those who are not at one with supporting Israel is clearly demonstrated by the Australian Jewish News which, just last week, pulled a story attacking those in the Jewish community who attacked their fellow Jews with the the sort of offensive epithets directed at Sarah Schwartz.
My Israel question
I can speak personally to how the Jewish community reacts when Israel or the Israel Lobby comes under scrutiny. Back in 2006, Melbourne University Press published my son’s book “My Israel Question”. The book flew off the shelves.
The response from the so-called powers-that be in the Jewish community – including a Jewish Federal member of Parliament in Parliament, even exhorting people not to buy the book – bordered on feral.
Even putting aside the death threats to my son and his then partner, as an example of hate mail – which Schwartz has so clearly shown in her evidence – one early so-called correspondent wrote that he hoped that when the Nazis came to Australia that he and his parents would be the first to be marched into the gas chambers.
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The tide has turned a little at the Royal Commission into Antisemitism with a second Jewish witness breaking from the Israel narrative. Jeffrey Loewenstein reports.
Sarah Schwartz, co-founder of the Jewish Council of Australia (JCA), gave evidence at the Royal Commission into Anti-Semitism and Social Cohesion last week.
I venture to suggest that it will come to be seen that Schwartz gave seminal evidence which the Commissioner is going to find hard to ignore when she is writing her report; evidence supported yesterday by the compelling testimony of Jewish university peace activist Yasmine Johnson.
Until Schwartz gave her evidence, we had seen testimonies given by members of the Jewish community – some of which can only be described as very troubling in terms of evidence – which sometimes bordered on hysterical.
But, the elephant in the room?
Were the ‘attacks’ described really attacks of an antisemitic nature,
or were they people venting their anger and outrage at Jews seen to be rusted-on, unquestioning supporters of Israel’s egregious actions in Gaza?
Take the example of a uni student in Canberra who just yesterday was reported in the Nine media thus: ”Liat told the Commission she had felt “very physically unsafe” during the long encampment at her university campus … when people would laugh and leer at me and say, ‘Look at the baby killer, look at the genocide supporter’”.
No, that is not pleasant, but the fact is – a fact unchallenged aside from the state of Israel itself and the likes of the ECAJ in Australia – that more than 20,000 Palestinian children have been killed by the state of Israel and more than 44,000 injured since October 2023.
Why the rise in antisemitism?
What was more than significant, is that many of those who gave evidence of alleged antisemitism demonstrated absolutely no introspection. Why had there been a rise in anti-semitism sinceOctober 7?
Not because Hamas attacked Israel. No, it was, in many cases people showing their anger, yes, in some instances in a totally misguided way, at Israel’s actions in Gaza. Why did some 300,000 people from all walks of life and all ages, march across the Sydney Harbour Bridge on a foul, wet and windy day?
The palpable anger by a significant part of the Australian community, including many Jews, at what Israel did in Gaza, and continues to do to this day, is reflected in the sober evidence given at the Royal Commission yesterday by Yasmine Johnson, a co-convener for Students for Palestine and a protest organiser.
Following her evidence, Johnson, who is Jewish, told the media
the idea that campus protests “create a dangerous atmosphere, fear for people, is farcical”.
Antisemitism, anti-genocide conflation
“What we’ve heard,” she said “so far is day after day after day of evidence which conflates legitimate anti-genocide, pro-Palestine activism with genuine antisemitism which exists in our society.”
The earlier mentioned witness Liat, and others like her, may feel uncomfortable about what is being shouted out at her as much as she probably sees posters like ‘Free Palestine’ as confronting and antisemitic, but has Liat – who acts as a spokesperson for the Australasian Union of Jewish Students – either personally or on behalf of her organisation ever publicly accused Israel of being responsible for war crimes in Gaza, even if not genocide? Almost certainly, not!
And that is the rub.
Might this alleged antisemitism just have had something to do with Jews so visibly parading around with Israeli flags draped acrosss their shoulders, waving Israelis flags at solidarity rallies for Israel, Jewish communal leaders excoriating those who called out Israel for engaging in genocide or starving children, and welcoming the Israeli President as their “national leader” ?
Really? I thought we were Australians.
The “average” person could be forgiven for concluding that members of the Jewish community were demonstrating that they identified with and supported Israel.
The question to be asked here is why it is that criticising Israel by Jews is said to make the speaker a self-hating Jew, a “kapo” a “Judenrat” or, as in the case of Schwartz, to even be accused on ABC Radio National as being ‘anti Jewish?”
They are shameful, offensive and disgraceful epithets. They are intended to be so.
Not be ignored in the above is that the likes of a Mark Leibler, the ECAJ, AIJAC, the Zionist Federation of Australia and similar groups see Jews who criticise Israel as a no-go area even if they, falsely, assert that Jews are free to openly express their views about Israel. It’s simply untrue!
There is the expectation from these quarters that all Jews will, as a matter of solidarity, support Israel as the Zionist/Jewish homeland. With this forked-tongue and double-speak it is no wonder that the sort of slurs and insults which Schwartz described at the Royal Commission are rife in the Jewish community.
A climate of fear
Conversely, those in the Jewish community who might otherwise speak out against Israel fear that they will be subjected to all manner of insults and even the break-down of family relationships.
Given the airing of Schwartz’s evidence, one has to also wonder why there has been total silence from the usually vocal Jewish organisations. Should they not be publicly calling out vilification of fellow-Jews, calling for vilification to be stopped and asking for respect for those Jews who are not Zionists, strident or not.
Proof of the “attitude” in the Jewish community to those who are not at one with supporting Israel is clearly demonstrated by the Australian Jewish News which, just last week, pulled a story attacking those in the Jewish community who attacked their fellow Jews with the the sort of offensive epithets directed at Sarah Schwartz.
My Israel question
I can speak personally to how the Jewish community reacts when Israel or the Israel Lobby comes under scrutiny. Back in 2006, Melbourne University Press published my son’s book “My Israel Question”. The book flew off the shelves.
The response from the so-called powers-that be in the Jewish community – including a Jewish Federal member of Parliament in Parliament, even exhorting people not to buy the book – bordered on feral.
Even putting aside the death threats to my son and his then partner, as an example of hate mail – which Schwartz has so clearly shown in her evidence – one early so-called correspondent wrote that he hoped that when the Nazis came to Australia that he and his parents would be the first to be marched into the gas chambers.
Unhinged? Yes!
But as Schwartz spelt out in her evidence at the Royal Commission many in the Jewish community see attacking those who do not support Israel 100% as legitimate. And if that extends to thuggery, look no further than the Jewish group the Lions of Zion and their “activities” – an organisation supported by the powers that be in the Jewish community.
Thankfully the JCA has provided an ever-growing forum and voice for Jews who will not remain silent given Israel’s genocide in Gaza and breaches of multiple international laws and conventions.
Let’s not forget, while Israel denies what a slew of scholars, human rights organisations and aid and medical agencies have found – including those learned on genocide, some of whom even live in Israel itself – the facts on the ground speak volumes. We have all seen and read about it.
Israel clearly stands guilty as charged!
Starting from scratch on nuclear in Australia would take longer, cost more than first-time offshore wind
Sophie Vorrath, Jul 13, 2026, https://reneweconomy.com.au/starting-from-scratch-on-nuclear-in-australia-would-take-longer-cost-more-than-first-time-offshore-wind/
Building nuclear for the first time in Australia would take longer and cost more than building offshore wind for the first time in Australia, according to modelling by Australia’s premier science agency that once again rules out nuclear power from any and all cost-efficient scenarios for a net zero grid.
CSIRO each year delivers an annual GenCost report, a collaboration with the Australian Energy Market Operator that provides an “objective benchmark” on the costs of electricity generation, storage and hydrogen production technologies, to guide policy.
Last week, the chief economist at CSIRO’s Energy Research unit and the lead author of GenCost report, Paul Graham, discussed the findings of the draft report for 2025-26 to the Australian Wind Energy conference in Melbourne, ahead of the release of the final report, due this quarter.
So far in Australia’s journey to net zero emissions by 2050, the electricity sector has done the vast bulk of the heavy lifting on decarbonisation, as solar and wind firmed by storage supply close to half of the generation mix of the National Electricity Market (NEM).
Power plants critical to the country’s electricity production use river water to cool their reactors, which heats the water that is then released back into the river.
The job from here will be tougher, as the last of Australia’s coal fleet is ushered out. The job of the GenCost team at CSIRO is to work out what sort of contribution the electricity sector can continue to make to emissions reduction while still keeping costs as efficient as possible.
“What that means, in effect, is that the electricity sector should do enough abatement so that it doesn’t cost any more than abatement anywhere else in the economy, and to determine that, we can use scenario analysis,” Graham told the conference on Wednesday last week.
CSIRO’s draft GenCost modelling continues to find that a combination of wind and solar with firming technologies is the best way forward on both costs and emissions reductions.
On the flip-side, Graham also shared some of the numbers on where “first-of-a-kind” technologies landed in the modelling.
The below slide [on original] compares the construction times and cost premiums of a range of technologies not yet built at scale in Australia, before, including gas with carbon capture and storage (CCS), black coal with CCS, nuclear small modular reactor, nuclear large-scale, solar thermal and offshore wind.
It’s a timely reminder of why the federal Coalition’s nuclear focused campaign was such a disaster for the party at the 2025 election, and yet remains the favoured energy policy path for the LNP at the same time as it promises to deliver cheaper electricity while also putting the brakes on renewables.
As Graham told the conference, the numbers still well and truly rule out nuclear, while leaving offshore wind still “in the pocket” as a potential part of Australia’s future generation mix.
“All these technologies on the left, on the left there of that table, we’ve never really built at scale in Australia before,” Graham told the conference.
“We have to expect that there’s going to be some sort of premium associated with delivering first project and probably the second project. We tried to work through what we think that premium could be, based on this global analysis that will support projects and how they’ve fared.
“The highest premium seems to be associated with projects that take longer to build, and nuclear … takes the longest, so it’s at least six years, probably eight years. Six years is probably best case scenario, just for the construction stage.
“The data says that those sorts of [nuclear] projects where the first time the country tries to build them, generally costs at least 100% more than the international best practice,” he told the conference.
“And so we’ve got assumptions about what these first of a kind costs will be after we’ve developed the first few projects we can then assume that the workforce is able to build these close to the world best practice and then we can build things at lower cost after that.
“So when we model these different emission intensity targets and we allow for the model to build, either with mature technologies like onshore wind and solar, or onshore wind and solar plus some of these first-of-a-kind projects, then what this shows is the generation mix that the model says is least cost.
“And what that looks like from a cost perspective is that the mature technology scenario is the lowest-cost scenario. It is a bit more expensive to have offshore wind and CCS, and but not too much more, but the most expensive in each case is nuclear,” Graham said.
“The modelling didn’t want to build … particularly a lot of CCS or nuclear, because it’s quite significantly higher than the cost we need to get to net zero, so adding those technologies would only increase the cost of getting to net zero.
“As offshore wind goes, it’s in the pocket. Potentially it would be better if the costs were at the lower end of the range … but we certainly can’t rule out, we certainly wouldn’t say that offshore wind is necessarily in or out, it just depends on where we land on that on that cost uncertainty range.”
From colonial forts to nuclear submarines, Australia’s response to distant conflicts reveals a recurring pattern that continues to shape its defence strategy, writes Professor Vince Hooper.
By Vince Hooper | 13 July 2026, https://independentaustralia.net/politics/politics-display/from-crimea-to-aukus-how-distant-wars-reshape-australia,21293
IN THE EARLY MONTHS of 1854, as news of Britain’s entry into the Crimean War reached the Australian colonies, an extraordinary panic took hold.
Newspapers debated, in full seriousness, whether Russia would attack Sydney or Melbourne, whether the objective would be occupation or merely the seizure of gold from colonial banks. Fort Denison was commissioned on Pinchgut Island in Sydney Harbour. Victoria passed legislation to establish a Volunteer Corps of up to 2,000 men. A war fought thousands of miles away over a peninsula in the Black Sea was catalysing Australia’s first independent military capability.
The panic did not end with the peace. In 1863, the Russian corvette Bogatyr, flagship of the Pacific squadron under Rear Admiral Popov, sailed into Melbourne undetected. More than 8,000 Melburnians visited the ship during a goodwill tour.
After the corvette departed, the Sydney Morning Herald reported that the crew had been surveying the coastal fortifications of Port Jackson and Botany Bay. The revelation deepened the following year when a Polish officer who had deserted from the Bogatyr disclosed that Popov had received orders to attack British naval targets near Australian shores in the event of war.
Russian invasion scares recurred in 1870, when the corvette Boyarin appeared at Hobart; again in 1882, when three Russian warships entered Melbourne and in 1885, when Bare Island Fort stood guard over Botany Bay. For three decades, Crimea’s aftershock kept reshaping Australian defence thinking.
That a war triggered by a dispute over the custody of holy sites in the Holy Land could produce this cascade of consequences at the furthest edge of the British Empire is the analytical point. Australia’s strategic environment is not normally distributed. It is characterised by long periods of apparent stability punctuated by sharp, regime-changing shocks from quarters no plausible risk model would have flagged.
The original Crimean War also embedded its human residue in the colonial landscape. After hostilities ended, the British Government actively encouraged veterans to migrate, investigating New South Wales and Tasmania as suitable destinations. In Western Australia, Crimean veterans populated the pensioner guard force and the broader settler community.
Two Victoria Cross recipients of the 77th Regiment, Sergeant John Park and Private Alexander Wright, received their awards in Sydney.
Russian trophy guns arrived in Adelaide in 1859 and were fired to mark the Duke of Edinburgh’s visit in 1867. Suburbs named after Crimean battles, Balaclava in Melbourne, Sebastopol near Ballarat, Alma and Inkerman across New South Wales and Victoria, wrote the war into the geography that Australians still walk through daily.
Fast forward 160 years and the pattern repeats with unsettling fidelity. Russia’s annexation of Crimea in March 2014 might have remained a European affair in Australian strategic consciousness. The downing of Malaysia Airlines Flight 17 over eastern Ukraine on 17 July 2014, killing 298 people, including 38 Australian citizens and residents, ensured it did not.
The Abbott Government imposed sanctions, co-sponsored the UN Security Council resolution and pursued accountability through international courts. Abbott publicly vowed to “shirtfront” Russian President Vladimir Putin at the Brisbane G20 just months later, an Australian Rules football term for a front-on collision. The register was antipodean. The underlying dynamic, a distant Crimean event triggering a visceral response at the periphery, was not.
A decade on, the aftershock continues to propagate. In May 2025, the International Civil Aviation Organisation (ICAO) Council found Russia responsible under international law for the downing of MH17. Russia appealed; Foreign Minister Penny Wong called the response “deplorable”. The 2014 trigger, like the 1854 trigger before it, has not finished reverberating.
The objection writes itself: MH17 was contingent. A plane happened to be in the wrong airspace. That is not a structural transmission mechanism; it is bad luck. But this objection misunderstands what “fat tails” mean. The whole point of heavy-tailed distributions is that the specific trigger is unpredictable while the class of events is not.
Nobody in 1854 predicted that a dispute over church keys in the Holy Land would catalyse Australian volunteer militias. Nobody in 1863 predicted that a Polish deserter from a Russian corvette would reveal contingency plans to raid Melbourne. Nobody in 2014 predicted that a Buk missile in Donetsk would kill 38 Australians in a sunflower field.
The triggers were contingent. The vulnerability, a peripheral state deeply integrated into alliance networks but geographically remote from their theatres, was structural. Fat tails do not require predictable triggers. They require structural exposure to extreme events.
Russia’s broader invasion of Ukraine in 2022 confirmed the pattern rather than creating it. AUKUS, announced in September 2021, predated the invasion, but the war validated its logic. Le Chatelier’s principle holds that an external shock to equilibrium triggers a compensating response. In 1854, that response was a volunteer corps: modest, reversible, low commitment.
Nuclear-powered submarines, serviced at Plymouth’s Devonport dockyard, are none of those things. The Plymouth connection closes a circle: one of the handful of Australian colonists to fight in the original Crimean War was Spicer Cookworthy, a subaltern in the First Regiment of Foot, bearing the surname of that city’s most famous son, William Cookworthy, the Quaker who discovered china clay in Cornwall and founded the Plymouth porcelain works.
The colonies of the 1850s built forts and raised volunteers. Australia of the 2020s is acquiring nuclear submarines and reorienting its entire defence procurement architecture. The scale has changed, but the mechanism, the propagation of distant shocks through alliance networks to force option exercise at the periphery, has not.
Policymakers who assume mean reversion, or price Australian security using a normal distribution, will be caught out by the next Crimean shock. They always are.
The hypersonic hypocrisy of Pacific nuclear politics
Australia and New Zealand rightly criticise China’s nuclear-capable missile tests in the Pacific. Their silence on repeated US tests exposes a glaring double standard.
In March, the US launched a Minuteman III intercontinental ballistic missile from the Vandenberg Space Force Base, California. Travelling at speeds of more than 24,000 kilometres an hour, it landed near the Kwajalein Atoll in the Marshall Islands 6,700 kilometres away 24 minutes later.
Minuteman III missiles can deliver up to three separate nuclear warheads, each more than 20 times as powerful as the bomb dropped on Hiroshima.
On 3 March, 2025, the Marshall Islands formally announced its intention to join the South Pacific Nuclear Free Zone by signing the Treaty of Rarotonga.
Searches of the NZ Herald and Stuff websites for stories about the missile test, and the signing of the treaty come up empty.
And yet, on Tuesday, both the NZ Herald and The Post led with news that China had test-fired a nuclear-capable ballistic missile in the Pacific. Neither report made any mention of the 15 ballistic missile tests fired into the Pacific by the USA since 2021.
New Zealand Foreign Minister Winston Peters and his Australian counterpart, Penny Wong, were both quoted as saying the Chinese missile test went against the intent of the Treaty of Rarotonga.
“The Pacific Islands Forum leaders have made clear that they want the Pacific to be an ocean of peace. We believe this test is inconsistent with that objective,” Wong said.
Wong isn’t wrong.
In 2024, Kiribati publicly criticised an earlier test of a Minuteman III missile that also landed in the Ronald Reagan Space and Missile Test Range located near the Kwajalein Atoll. As the name suggests, the tests are a regular occurrence.
A statement from the President’s office, reported by RNZ, said Kiribati objected equally to China and the US using the South Pacific for test-firing nuclear-capable missiles.
“Kiribati continues to advocate for the cessation of weapons testing in the Pacific Ocean and urges global cooperation to ensure the peace, security, and stability of our shared environment. We remain committed to protecting the peaceful future of the Pacific and safeguarding the well-being of future generations.”
It’s a thought – almost – echoed by Winston Peters in his response to the Chinese test: “This missile was fired into the South Pacific Nuclear Free Zone established by the Treaty of Rarotonga. China’s action goes against the object and intent of that Treaty.”
You’ll search long and hard to find any similar criticism of the US missile tests by Ministers Peters and Wong. That’s despite the people of the Marshall Islands themselves and the leaders of neighbouring countries making it clear any testing of ballistic missiles in the Pacific goes against the spirit of the Treaty of Rarotonga.
The Chinese missile test is widely being reported as a response to Australia and Fiji’s signing of the Ocean of Peace Alliance the previous day.
Without confirmation from China, it’s impossible to know for certain, but it seems likely that the alliance – which New Zealand Prime Minister Christopher Luxon has expressed interest in signing up to – is seen as a ratcheting up of military tensions in the South Pacific.
When it comes to the “object and intent” of the Treaty of Rarotonga, mentioned by Peters, few if any of the signatories would have countenanced one of their members purchasing nuclear-powered submarines.
But in 2023, Australia announced it was doing just that with the planned purchase of three nuclear submarines at an estimated cost of more than A$300 billion (about 15 times the combined GDP of the Forum countries excluding New Zealand and Australia).
Shortly after the announcement, Solomon Islands Prime Minister Manasseh Damukana Sogavare told the UN General Assembly that his nation “would like to keep our region nuclear-free and put the region’s nuclear legacy behind us… We do not support any form of militarisation in our region that could threaten regional and international peace and stability.”
The legacy Sogavare mentions is nowhere felt more keenly than the Marshall Islands, where the US carried out 67 atmospheric nuclear tests between 1946 and 1956, resulting in sky-high rates of thyroid cancer.
The US has paid out just US$150 million in compensation despite the internationally mandated Marshall Islands Nuclear Claims Tribunal having awarded over US$2 billion in personal injury and property claims.
A survey by the Asia New Zealand Foundation earlier this year found that just 23 per cent of New Zealanders viewed China as a threat, compared to 35 per cent who saw the US as one.
The US has more than 5,000 nuclear warheads with 1,700 actively deployed; China has 620 with 34 deployed.
China has a long-standing policy of no-first-use of nuclear weapons, while the US refuses to rule it out.
When our leaders claim to be supporting Pacific countries in their commitment to a nuclear-free Pacific by rightly criticising China’s missile tests while steadfastly refusing to criticise the USA’s regular testing of intercontinental nuclear-capable ballistic missiles, they’re indulging in hypersonic hypocrisy.
Cooperation yes, uranium no: planned uranium sales to India would facilitate certain nuclear waste and risk and possible nuclear weapons
Dave Sweeney | Nuclear Free Campaigner, Australian Conservation Foundation | www.acf.org.au, 9 July 26
In response to news of a major uranium deal between Australia and India, the Australian Conservation Foundation’s Dave Sweeney said:
“There are serious and unresolved concerns about plans to elevate Australian uranium sales to India.
“For more than a decade there has been a civil nuclear cooperation agreement with India but regulatory concerns have constrained exports.
“A Joint Standing Committee on Treaties examination of the deal in September 2015 recommended a series of clear steps occur before any Australian uranium was supplied to India.
“It said important changes and checks and balances were needed, including independent review of India’s nuclear regulatory regime, improved safety standards, the full separation of India’s military and civil nuclear facilities, improved nuclear decommissioning planning and comprehensive on-site inspections from the International Atomic Energy Agency.
“These concerns remain relevant today. There are compelling reasons for Australia not to send uranium to India.
“Australian uranium would fuel radioactive risk and waste and potentially allow the diversion of domestic uranium reserves to fuel India’s nuclear weapons program in an already tense region.
Some in the Indian government basically have admitted as much, including the former head of New Delhi’s official National Security Advisory Board, K. Subrahmanyam who outlined to the Times of India that given ‘India’s uranium ore crunch, it is to India’s advantage to categorize as many power reactors as possible as civilian ones to be refuelled by imported uranium and conserve our native uranium fuel for weapon-grade plutonium production’.
“Australia regularly cites the importance of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, yet India – a nuclear weapons state – is not a signatory to the NPT.
“Australia should not facilitate atomic exceptionalism or risk in the region.
“Like Australia, India’s energy future is renewable, not radioactive. That is the policy area that the Australia and Indian prime ministers should be preferencing”.
Vile abuse, targeted by Murdoch – The cost of speaking out against Israel
by Stephanie Tran | Jul 2, 2026, https://michaelwest.com.au/hitlers-jew-judenrat-kapo-the-cost-of-speaking-out-against-israel/
Executive Director of the Jewish Council of Australia, Sarah Schwartz, has told the Bondi Royal Commission of sustained abuse by pro-Israel activists. Stephanie Tran reports.
Giving evidence on Thursday, Sarah Schwartz, a human rights lawyer, said attacks from pro-Israel groups sought to delegitimise Jewish people who criticise Israel.
“They rest on the idea that Jewish identity is inherently tied to Israel, and therefore Jewish people who don’t support Israel or who criticise Israel are not really Jewish and are traitors,” she told the Commission.
Schwartz said she had been referred to as a “self-hating Jew”, “Hitler’s Jew”, “kapo” and “Judenrat”, and had been depicted using Holocaust imagery, including “on a train to concentration camps” and with the yellow Star of David imposed on Jews under Nazi rule.
Holocaust weaponised
She said the atrocities of the Holocaust were a motivation for her Palestine solidarity work and the weaponisation by pro-Israel accounts of Holocaust imagery was “incredibly disturbing”.
“I was taught that never again meant never again for anyone, and that’s why I do the work that I do,” Schwartz said.
“To have the symbols of the Holocaust and Nazi imagery and Jewish persecution used against me has been incredibly disturbing and distressing, and I think it
Schwartz said the stereotype that all Jewish people are politically aligned with Israel “causes immense harm”.
“I speak … almost every day to Jewish people who contact me and who are terrified of speaking out, because they know that if they speak their political convictions, they face the risk of a similar sort of abuse and vilification and targeting that I have experienced.”
Murdoch media coverage fuelled abuse
Schwartz told the commission that reporting by The Australian undermined her safety and ultimately led her to abandon a police application intended to protect her from ongoing harassment.
She recounted an incident in March 2025 after police applied for a personal safety intervention order (PSIO) on her behalf against lawyer Zara Cooper, who targeted Schwartz on Instagram under the pseudonym “@clammy_fraud”.
Schwartz said she first learned of the application through a journalist from The Australian, who contacted her to say the newspaper was preparing a story.
“I informed him I hadn’t been informed of the nature of the PSIO,” she said.
“When I asked him if he could provide me with a copy, he said he couldn’t provide me with a copy … because I didn’t know its contents, I also couldn’t really respond to a lot of it, because it was a police application.”
Schwartz said the following day’s front-page article incorrectly suggested she, rather than police, had initiated the proceedings in an attempt to suppress free speech.
Free speech for me, not for thee
he told the Commission that The Australian subsequently published further articles about the case, including reproducing images and slurs that formed part of the material relied upon by police in seeking the intervention order.
“What was most distressing to me is The Australian chose to republish some of the offensive imagery that was the basis on which police applied for the PSIO,” she said.
“[The Australian] republished content that took my image and placed it on a train to concentration camps, content calling me a kapo and other various slurs.”
Schwartz said the coverage convinced her that pursuing legal protection would expose her to further public attention and place her at greater risk.
“It became very clear to me after that coverage that this was becoming a media circus,” she said.
“Having reported these matters to police … was actually something that was
“going to make me less safe because of the media coverage.”
She subsequently told police she no longer wished to proceed with the intervention order, and the application was withdrawn. She has since been reluctant to report further incidents because she fears doing so would attract similar publicity.
“It’s become very clear to me that, because of the media interest in me as a person, but particularly because of News Corp’s targeting of me, it’s not going to be safe for me to engage in reporting,” she said.
She also expressed concern that republishing the abusive material normalised antisemitic attacks against Jewish critics of Israel.
“I think that media reporting really normalises the use of these terms against other Jewish people … people see that coverage and think that it is legitimate to call a Jewish person Nazi-aligned or to place our face on a train to concentration camps.”
Being Pro-Palestine is not antisemitism
Schwartz dispelled suggestions that pro-Palestinian activism is a significant driver of antisemitism, stating that, despite attempts to portray Palestine solidarity spaces as hostile to Jews, that had not reflected her own experience.
“I know that there is a lot of public discourse … that suggests that human rights spaces and Palestine solidarity spaces, in particular, are spaces that might be hostile to Jewish people,” she said.
“That hasn’t been my experience at all.”
Instead, Schwartz said she had received “many messages of support and clear condemnations of antisemitism” from Muslim colleagues following the Bondi terror attack.
Government response
Schwartz criticised the government’s responses to antisemitism, which have disproportionately focused on the Palestine solidarity movement, including the banning of protest slogans.
“I think that government responses, which locate the source of anti-Semitism within the Palestine solidarity movement, suggest for Jewish people who are also part of that movement that either we’re not really Jewish or that we are somehow against Jewish people in our own communities.”
Asked what measures would most effectively combat antisemitism, Schwartz said governments should prioritise addressing far-right extremism and
“It’s really important for us to take the threat of far-right extremism really seriously … we know that it’s rising and it’s becoming more mainstream,” she said.
“It is critically important that governments and institutions don’t adopt policies in response to antisemitism that engage in that form of conflation itself that suggests that antisemitism is coming from the Palestine solidarity movement.”
She also called for progressive Jewish organisations to be included in policymaking on antisemitism.
“It’s really important that organisations such as the Jewish Council and other progressive Jewish organizations actually have a seat at the table” she said.
“It shows the broader community that
“the Jewish community, like every community, has a diversity of opinions.”
Former WA health chief warns AUKUS inquiry of ‘nuclear disaster waiting to happen’
A former Western Australian public health chief has warned the AUKUS inquiry that there is a ‘nuclear disaster waiting to happen’, arguing there is no safety plan to protect Perth communities in the event of a major nuclear accident at naval base HMAS Stirling.
By Tegan George,Tue 30 Jun 2026, https://thepoint.com.au/new/260630-former-wa-health-chief-warns-aukus-inquiry-of-nuclear-disaster-waiting-to-happen
A former Western Australian public health chief has warned the AUKUS inquiry that there is a ‘nuclear disaster waiting to happen’, arguing there is no safety plan to protect Perth communities in the event of a major nuclear accident at naval base HMAS Stirling.
Dr Colin Hughes, the former head of Public Health in Perth, told the independent inquiry that governments had failed to adequately prepare for the possibility of a nuclear accident involving visiting or serviced submarines.
“There is actually no nuclear safety plan for Rockingham, Kwinana, or the people of Fremantle and Perth in the case of a major nuclear catastrophe,” he said.
Dr Hughes described a worst-case scenario involving a major incident at a submarine servicing facility, triggering explosions, fires, radiation leaks and mass evacuations across Perth’s southern suburbs.
“Concrete slabs are scattered across access roads, twisted steel hangs from shattered structures,” he said.
“Sections of the reactor building are simply gone. Fires burn in dozens of locations.
He said emergency responders would be confronted by an “invisible threat”.
“Radiation cannot be seen. It has no smell, no colour, no warning.
“Radiation alarms on emergency vehicles begin sounding, and some responders stare at the readings, unsure whether the instruments are malfunctioning.
“Commanders quickly realise this is not a normal fire.”
Dr Hughes said the scenario had been developed with the assistance of ChatGPT and was based on historical nuclear disasters, including Chernobyl and Fukushima.
“The precautionary principle in medicine is always to take the worst-case scenario and to say, ‘we need to be able to plan for it and prevent it’,” he told the inquiry.
Under the AUKUS agreement, Australia will purchase three second-hand Virginia-class submarines from the United States, with deliveries expected from the early 2030s.
Dr Hughes argued governments needed to answer some fundamental questions before moving ahead with the trilateral security pact.
“Where is the hazard equipment for our first responders to be able to go down there and extract people who have been injured? And where do they go? What are the hospital facilities?” he asked.
“Where’s the map that says this childcare centre, that kindergarten, that school, that aged care centre — how many people are there? Where are they going to go, and how are we going to do it?
“Because that is what we need to know as a population.”
Commissioner Dr Carmen Lawrence, a former WA Premier, said comparisons with overseas nuclear submarine bases highlighted how little information was available to communities living near HMAS Stirling.
“I’ve had a good look at some of the material that exists in the UK and the US, in communities that are home bases for nuclear-powered vessels and, in some cases, nuclear-armed vessels,” she said.
“And I have to say on the basis of that comparison we’re not doing very well at this stage in terms of informing our population, let alone first responders.”
Dr Hughes told the hearing that Western Australia had navigated the COVID-19 pandemic successfully because the state had ‘listened to the science’.
‘We saved over 10,000 lives because government listened to health professionals,’ he said.
“But they’re not listening now. They’re ignoring the fact that we have a nuclear disaster waiting to happen.”
Commissioner Lawrence acknowledged that while the chance of an accident may be ‘low probability’, the consequences would be ‘high impact’.
Dr Hughes also raised concerns about the potential long-term health impacts of radiation exposure, citing studies that showed “people who serve on the submarine are 30 per cent more likely to develop cancers of various kinds.”
He argued governments needed to assess the risks associated with accidents, terrorism and military conflict and ensure communities were prepared.
“My plea is, please, if you are going to continue with this madness, at least tell the people of Rockingham and Kwinana how they are going to escape or protect themselves from a nuclear disaster waiting to happen,” he said.
Liberal frontbencher gorges on nuclear freebies
Rear Window, Hannah Wootton, Jul 7, 2026
You’d think visiting Europe in its latest heatwave would convince anyone of the sun’s power. But when Charles
Kiefel is paying your airfare, nuclear still beats solar.
Hannah Wootton, Jul 7, 2026 –If there’s one thing opposition energy spokesman Dan Tehan loves more than
nuclear power, it’s a free “study tour”. Especially if it involves the uranium sector’s
biggest cheerleader Charles Kiefel.
In mid-June, Tehan headed to London, Oslo and Munich for “high-level discussions around energy, industry and defence policy”. His economy flights, accommodation and meals were all covered by energy business groups the Svalbard Group and Just Transition Institute.
But Tehan also got a business-class airfare from Munich back to Melbourne paidfor by Kiefel, the “former director of the Clean Energy Regulator”, according to his
parliamentary register of interests. Funny how Kiefel’s title doesn’t mention the businessman is a proponent of exporting uranium to the US. Or that he funded a separate “study tour” for Tehan to the US last September to look at nuclear
reactors.
But flying economy all the way back from Europe is a Europe is a gruelling ask for a man such as Tehan, who is carrying the burden of an atomic future. And Kiefel is certainly a fan of gifting him the finer things in life.
The US trip included putting Tehan up in Washington DC’s luxury Hay-Adams Hotel. It overlooks Lafayette Square and charges $1800-a-night. The stay wasrevealed by this column [https://www.afr.com/rear-window/senior-liberal-s-luxury-hotel-tv-gaffe-20250909-p5mtp6], when Tehan beamed into a Sky News interview from his hotel room and forgot to turn off the TV screen with the hotel’s branding in the background.
The investment has been worth it for Kiefel. Tehan’s fervent commitment to nuclear [https://www.afr.com/policy/energy-and-climate/why-i-believe-the-liberal-party-must- reset-its-climate-playbook-20251105-p5n7wa] only increased following the US trip. No wonder the anti-nuclear brigade went feral over it.
He’s secured a lasting loyalty, too. Just four days before Tehan jetted off for the June trip, he penned an opinion piece for his own website accusing “Labor’s energy luddites” of “dragging Australia into the Dark Ages”.
The evidence for all this? “What American officials told me
[https://www.afr.com/politics/federal/nuclear-energy-not-done-with-yet-say-liberals-20250908- p5mt72], repeatedly, when I visited” last year. Oh Danny Boy, at least pretend you came up with your opinions independent of multimillionaire backers.
He even referenced conversations with Singaporeans on that trip who told him how their government was looking into new nuclear technologies. “Singapore, a city-state with no natural resources, is preparing seriously. What exactly is our
excuse?” Could it be the abundant sources of non-nuclear energy?
The June trip presumably offered a new source for Tehan to cite. It included site visits to universities and meetings with executives from BP, Shell, and Vitol. As for the “defence policy” part of his discussions, Tehan visited an Oxfordshire facility which is “home of the UK’s civil and military nuclear science developments” and met with “companies involved in defence” in Norway. Plus the Norwegian energy and defence ministers. Reassuring stuff.
Tehan told us he took the trip as “any opportunity to get access to senior government ministers when you’re in opposition is too good an opportunity to pass, especially when it doesn’t cost the taxpayer a cent”.
The Coalition promises an independent, self-reliant energy future. A shame that the same can’t be said of Tehan’s policy positions or travel plans.
1 This month.
Australians deserve the truth
about
AUKUS – https://aukuspublicinquiry.com/
30 July – WEBINAR (Free) – Is Nuclear Power the Solution to Climate Change? https://my.acaw.org.au/event/acaw-is-nuclear-power-the-solution-to-climate-change
18:30 – 19:45 ACST
19:00 – 20:15 AEST
PETITION – To: Prime Minister Anthony Albanese and the Australian Labor Government
of the week – Australians for War Powers Reform (AWPR)
To see nuclear-related stories in greater depth and intensity
Antinuclear 