Virginia, we have a problem
14 Jan 2025, |Peter Briggs, https://www.aspistrategist.org.au/virginia-we-have-a-problem/
Australia’s plan to acquire Virginia-class submarines from the United State is looking increasingly improbable. The US building program is slipping too badly.
This heightens the need for Australia to begin looking at other options, including acquiring Suffren-class nuclear attack submarines (SSNs) from France.
The Covid-19 pandemic dramatically disrupted work at the two shipyards that build Virginias, General Dynamics Electric Boat at Groton, Connecticut, and Huntington Ingalls Industries’ yard at Newport News, Virginia. It badly hindered output at many companies in the supply chain, too. With too few workers, the industry has built up a backlog, and yards are filling with incomplete submarines.
Within six years, the US must decide whether to proceed with sale of the first of at least three and possibly five Virginias to Australia, a boat that will be transferred from the US Navy’s fleet.
Nine months before the transfer goes ahead, the president of the day must certify that it will not diminish USN undersea capability. This certification is unlikely if the industry has not by then cleared its backlog and achieved a production rate of 2.3 a year—the long-term building rate of two a year for the USN plus about one every three years to cover Australia’s requirement.
The chance of meeting that condition is vanishingly small.
The situation in the shipyards is stark. The industry laid down only one SSN in 2021. It delivered none from April 2020 to May 2022. The USN has requested funding for only one Virginia in fiscal year 2025, breaking the two-a-year drumbeat, ‘due to limits on Navy’s budget topline and the growing Virginia class production backlog’.
As of January 2025, five of 10 Block IV Virginias ordered are in the yards, as are five of 12 Block Vs for which acquisition has been announced. (Work has not begun on the other seven Block Vs.)
The building time from laying down until delivery has increased from between 3 and 3.5 years before the pandemic to more than 5 years. The tempo is still slowing: the next Virginia, USS Iowa, is due to be delivered on 5 April 2025, 5.8 years after it was laid down.
On the original, pre-pandemic schedule, all the Block IVs could probably have been delivered to the USN by now. This is a gap that cannot be recovered in a few years, despite all the expensive manpower training and retention programs in hand.
Exacerbating the problem for the yards, the Block V submarines are 30 percent larger, and more complex to build, making a return to shorter build times unlikely. Speaking to their shareholders in October, the chief executives of Huntington Ingalls and General Dynamics blamed their slowing delivery tempo on supply chain and workforce issues. HII says it is renegotiating contracts for 17 Block IV and Block V Virginias.
Furthermore, Electric Boat has diverted its most experienced workers to avoid further slippage in building the first two ballistic missile submarines of the Columbia class, the USN’s highest priority shipbuilding program, in which the Newport News yard also participates.
It gets worse. Many USN SSNs that have joined the US fleet over the past few decades are unavailable for service, awaiting maintenance. The pandemic similarly disrupted shipyards that maintain the SSNs of the Los Angeles and Virginia classes. In September 2022, 18 of the 50 SSNs in commission were awaiting maintenance. The Congressional Budget Office reports lack of spending on spare parts is also forcing cannibalisation and impacting the availability of Virginia class SSNs.
Australia’s SSN plan must worsen the US’s challenge in recovering from this situation, adding to the congestion in shipyards and further over loading supply chains already struggling to deliver SSNs to the USN.
A US decision not to sell SSNs to Australia is inevitable, and on current planning we will have no stopgap to cover withdrawal of our six diesel submarines of the Collins class, the oldest of which has already served for 28 years.
In the end, Australia’s unwise reliance on the US will have weakened the combined capability of the alliance. And Australia’s independent capacity for deterrence will be weakened, too.
As I wrote in December, it is time to look for another solution. One is ordering SSNs of the French Suffren class. The design is in production, with three of six planned boats delivered. It is optimised for anti-submarine warfare, with good anti-surface, land-strike, special-forces and mining capability. It is a smaller design, less capable than the Virginia, but should be cheaper and is a better fit for Australia’s requirements.
Importantly, it requires only half the crew of a Virginia, and we should be able to afford and crew the minimum viable force of 12 SSNs.
Let’s build on the good progress in training, industry and facility preparations for supporting US and British SSNs in Australia, all of which should continue, and find a way to add to the alliance’s overall submarine capability, not reduce it.
AUKUS: Flawed and Sinking
January 13, 2025 Dr Binoy Kampmark, https://theaimn.net/aukus-flawed-and-sinking/
A stillborn agreement treated as thrivingly alive; an understanding celebrated as consensual and equal. The AUKUS security arrangement between Australia, the United Kingdom and the United States, envisaging the transfer and building of nuclear-powered submarines to the Royal Australian Navy, continues operating in haphazard fashion. So far, the stream has flown away from Australia and into the military industrial complexes of the UK and the US, both desperate to keep the production of these absurd boats steady.
Australia has yet to see the fabled white elephants of the sea and remain at the mercy of the US Congress. In the meantime, the country is becoming garrisoned, billeted and appropriated to Washington’s geopolitical vanities. Not being a natural enemy and adversary in any sense, and being the most lucrative trading partner, China has become a fantastically idiotic target for Canberra’s foreign policy dunces.Announced in September 2021 as “an enhanced trilateral security partnership,” AUKUS has hobbled and stuttered its way into 2025. Commentary from the pompom holders for war at such outlets as The Economist continue with such mild remarks as “ambitious but expensive”. The Australian, armed and eager to do battle in print and digital media against the Yellow Peril, features an article about feeding the military industrial complex by politely calling it “a defence revolution.”
19FortyFive fastens onto the idea that Australia’s naval modernisation is central in this endeavour, though never mentions the obvious beneficiary. (In two words: not Australia.) “Nevertheless, AUKUS allows for a broader integration of technological advances in its partners and much-needed modernization of the Australian navy.”
This optimistic glow, despite the limping, the delays, and the blunders, can also be found in Australian Defence. The military industrial complex never needs concrete reasons to exist. It’s a creature onto itself. “Global firms are partnering with Australian based entities in a bid to position themselves for lucrative AUKUS submarine contracts, despite law reforms needed to progress.” One of them is the Texas-based Fluor Corporation, an engineering and construction firm proud, in the words of its Australia & New Zealand president, Gillian Cagney, of its “thousand engineers who have nuclear capability.” Cagney, like most chiefs and CEOs in this line of work, is good at saying nothing about nothing in particular. When doing so, the language can be guaranteed a good mauling. “We have that experience and capability that we will be supporting the joint venture to bring to bear and making sure we’re bringing the best in class globally.”
Even then, Cagney concedes that the whole business of nuclear-powered submarines for the RAN, known in military planning circles as “Pillar One”, is dicey. Hardly a reason to panic, as this tortured statement testifies: “One of the things as Worley Fluor Australia we are able to do is in multiple sectors globally is to ramp up to meet our customers needs so it’s no different.”
From the United States Studies Centre, that comfortable, uncritical bastion of Pax Americana, a senior research associate, Alice Nason, is found telling France’s Libération that hiccups are bound to take place when the tasks are large. “In a project of this size, length and complexity of AUKUS, it’s no surprise that disruptions and delays are going to arise.” The truism here is intended to excuse the unpardonable. Why projects of such scale are ever needed is left dangling in ether.
These dreary excuses for justifications dressed up as analysis never hide the fundamental defect of AUKUS. It remains, almost entirely, governed by US domestic and foreign interests. It says almost nothing about Australia’s needs, merely speaking to confected Australian fears. It advances the agenda of insecurity, not security. The analysts, lined up from one row to another, cannot assure anybody about what Congress will do if the submarine supply quota lags, or if there will be a war over that strip of territory known as Taiwan.
No publication, however lovingly disposed to the business of war, can avoid the teasing worries. Even that pro-Washington, and US defence industry funded outlet based in Canberra, the Australian Strategic Policy Institute, has gone so far as to consider a heresy. In December, it ran an article by Peter Briggs, past president of the Submarine Institute of Australia, suggesting that Canberra consider acquiring “at least 12 submarines of the French Suffren design. The current AUKUS plan for eight nuclear-powered attack submarines (SSNs) has always been flawed, and now its risks are piling up.” And so we return to where we began: a Franco-Australian agreement to acquire submarines that was sunk in 2021 by Prime Minister Scott Morrison.
All in all, forget the submarines, Pillar One, or whatever pillar the strategists tie themselves in knots about. Focus, instead, on the second “pillar”. Australia has become captive – aided through its dim bulbed representatives – of an empire that fears growing old, haggard and weak. It has been enlisted as servitor, grounds keeper and nurse. Retirees from the US Navy are being given astronomical sums in consultancy fees to divulge wisdom they do not have on junkets Down Under. Think tankers from Australia purporting to be academics make similar trips to Washington to celebrate a failing agreement with treasonous delight. The price Australia is paying is already savagely burdensome. It may well, in the long run, prove worse.
Leaked polling shows regional support for renewables.
Colin Packham, January 14th, 2025, https://www.theaustralian.com.au/business/mining-energy/leaked-polling-shows-regional-support-for-renewables/news-story/aeba90ecc98aaa1f39698cfdaa237459
Leaked polling commissioned by renewables industry body The Clean Energy Council has found regional voters support renewable energy rather than nuclear power due to concerns about environmental impacts and the promise of economic opportunities from large-scale wind and solar projects.
Should the polling — seen by The Australian but not yet released publicly — be accurate, it indicates the Coalition has just months to reverse the sentiment ahead of an election where the opposition hopes to sway voters with its centrepiece strategy of building seven nuclear power stations.
A record number of Australians are struggling to pay their utility bills, a situation the Coalition hopes will result in a friendly swing to it when voters return to the polls. But, the research by Freshwater Strategy — a widely respected polling firm — shows regional voters remain concerned about nuclear energy despite also holding misgivings about renewables.
The poll showed regional respondents believed renewables would deliver larger benefits for them than metropolitan voters, as the transition sees a spree of new jobs and offers of financial sweeteners.
Both regional and metropolitan voters said they believed nuclear power is environmentally damaging, a stance which fuelled their broad concern about the fuel source.
The concern over nuclear power was sharper with Labor and Greens voters. Voters who identified as Coalition voters had a far weaker commitment to renewables than Greens voters.
Such a sentiment would aid the Coalition in cementing its standing with its core voter base, but the polling also found those yet to make up their minds about voting intentions had a favourable view on renewables.
These swing voters strongly believed renewables would lower power bills, the polling found.
The Coalition has insisted nuclear will lower power bills and remains the only feasible way Australia is going to meet its net zero emissions by 2050 commitment.
Recent polling shows the Coalition ahead in a two-party preferred vote as years of high inflation and 13 interest rate rises has led to simmering anger among voters.
The federal Labor government hopes for some reprieve from the Reserve Bank of Australia via an interest rate cut or two by May. Labor must return to the polls by May and the market has in recent weeks ramped up bets of a loosening of fiscal policy at the central bank’s meeting in February.
Labor hopes its re-election prospects will be bolstered and has committed Australia to a rapid transition away from coal. Labor has cemented its plan to have renewables generate 82 per cent of the country’s electricity by 2030 — a commitment which requires significant amounts of new wind, solar and batteries.
Some 100,000km of high voltage transmission lines will also need to be built by 2050 if Australia is to meet net-zero emissions targets, which threatens to cause significant upheaval to regional communities.
States and territories have steadily increased their financial compensation offers to affected communities but pockets of opposition remain.
Federal Energy Minister Chris Bowen continues to insist Australia will meet its 2030 targets, though independent figures have said the timetable is increasingly unlikely.
Colin Packham Colin Packham is the energy reporter at The Australian. He was previously at The Australian Financial Review and Reuters in Sydney and Canberra.
Nuclear radiation took her father’s eyesight. Now Karina’s fighting Dutton’s nuclear reactors
TV Channel 9 Jan 11, 2025, The Morning Edition podcast
When opposition leader Peter Dutton proposed nuclear energy reactors on almost every mainland state in June last year, he reignited divisive public debate. It’s a debate Indigenous Australians are unwillingly at the heart of. A story that starts in the 1950s, when radioactive fallout from bomb tests caused illness among Aboriginal communities that were not adequately protected by the government of the day. Today, audio producer Julia Carr-Catzel brings us a special edition of The Morning Edition on the resistance in Aboriginal communities to a potential nuclear energy industry in Australia. Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander listeners are advised that this podcast contains names of people who have died.
Amazon Is Censoring My Most Recent Magazine Issue
Caitlin Johnstone Jan 14, 2025
Without explanation Amazon has blocked and unpublished my last issue of JOHNSTONE magazine which features my painting of Luigi Mangione on the cover. The link to order it is now dead. When I asked for an explanation or appeal they just sent a template response referring me back to their publishing rules.
So that’s annoying. The pay-what-you-want ebook of the issue is still available for anyone who wants it.
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In her bid to secure her confirmation as Trump’s next Director of National Intelligence, Tulsi Gabbard is now pledging to support Section 702 of the FISA Act. This notorious law allows for the warrantless surveillance of Americans, and in congress Gabbard had previously fought to repeal it.
This is how the national security state works. You don’t change the machine, the machine changes you. Anyone who starts off opposing the imperial status quo of authoritarianism, warmongering and corruption either finds themselves excluded from the halls of power or adapts new positions in favor of the status quo.
The Australian political-media class has been rending its garments over a ridiculously fake incident of antisemitic graffiti at a synagogue in Sydney, which features both swastikas and the words “Free Palestine” right next to each other.
It’s weird how few people I see calling this what it so obviously is. Apparently we’re all supposed to take very seriously the idea that either (A) Nazis are spray painting the words “Free Palestine” next to their swastikas, or (B) that supporters of Palestinian rights are spray painting Nazi symbols next to their pro-Palestinian slogans. Apparently we’re all truly expected to pretend we don’t know some Israel supporter did this themselves to provide political cover for the genocide in Gaza.
It is always okay to express skepticism about dubious incidents of “antisemitism” in today’s political environment. Israel’s supporters are shitty, evil people who support genocide, and faking antisemitic incidents is a standard hasbara tactic with a well-documented history…………………………………… https://www.caitlinjohnst.one/p/amazon-is-censoring-my-most-recent?utm_source=post-email-title&publication_id=82124&post_id=154758013&utm_campaign=email-post-title&isFreemail=true&r=1ise1&triedRedirect=true&utm_medium=email
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Critical Archival Encounters and the Evolving Historiography of the Dismissal of the Whitlam Government (Part 6
By AIMN Editorial on January 12, 2025, By Jenny Hocking Continued from Part 5
The Lost Archive: Government House Guest Books
In 2010, I first requested access to the Government House guest books held by the Archives, which provide the details of visits and visitors to “their Excellencies” at Yarralumla. The catalogue lists a total of twenty-nine files, enumerated consecutively, constituting visitor books from May 1953 to February 1996. The guest books appear regularly from July 1961 until July 1974, before stopping altogether until December 1982.
The Archives insisted that the guest books for this period had never been transferred from Government House and they now appeared lost since neither institution claimed to hold them. What is puzzling in this regard is that Archives’ enumeration system, which numbers each file consecutively, has two consecutive numbers assigned yet not included in the catalogue corresponding to the missing dates, suggesting two missing files given identification numbers by the Archives which are no longer listed.
. The only other gap in these books, for a much shorter period between 1960 and 1961, has no such missing consecutive numbers in the catalogue which might accommodate a lost file…………………………………………………………………………………………
These missing guest books add fuel to the longstanding speculation that security and defence officials, notably the Chief Defence Scientist Dr John Farrands as the recognised authority on Pine Gap and the Joint Facilities, had briefed Kerr in the week before the dismissal about mounting security and defence concerns over Whitlam’s exposure of CIA agents working at Pine Gap, and his planned Prime Ministerial statement on this in the House of Representatives on the afternoon of 11 November 1975. …………………
The Burnt Archive: Sir John Kerr’s Prominent Supporters
In 1978, soon after Kerr left office, a cache of letters “of outstanding value” to Kerr was accidentally reduced to ashes in the Yarralumla incinerator……………….
Among his correspondents was the Queen’s second cousin, Lord Louis Mountbatten, Prince Philip’s uncle and King Charles III’s great mentor; the former Governor-General and distant royal relation, Viscount De L’Isle; and other prominent individuals supporting Kerr’s dismissal of Whitlam. These names alone indicate that these burnt letters were as important to history as they were to Kerr. …………..
…………… We now know, thanks to letters released in 2020 following the High Court’s decision in my legal action, that King Charles also fully supported Kerr’s actions…………………………..
Until their release in 2020 following the High Court’s decision in the Palace letters case they constituted the most significant “unattainable archive” in the dismissal panoply of secrets. The release of the letters signalled a rare moment of forced archival transparency in the face of determined refusals of access, and the harbinger of a significant historical re-evaluation of the dismissal in which they played a pivotal role.
What is critical for this discussion is that the closures of these otherwise public archives, both the Mountbatten papers and the Palace letters, were enabled by and remained hidden because of a claimed “convention” of Royal secrecy………………………………………………..
And so, this was how Kerr had labelled his letters to and from the Queen, as they had always been labelled, as “personal”. The only way to challenge the denial of access to personal records was to take a Federal Court action, a daunting and lengthy process. In 2016, with the support of a pro bono legal team, I commenced proceedings against the National Archives of Australia in the Federal Court, arguing that these Palace letters were not personal and should be publicly available, and seeking their release.
Four years and three court hearings later, the High Court found in a 6:1 decision that the Palace letters are not personal, leading to their release in full. …………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………..
A more complete history of the dismissal has emerged in fragments, still marred by partisan recollection, misplaced archives, and continuing secrecy. First, that Kerr was in secret contact with Fraser before he dismissed Whitlam; second, the definitive role of High Court justice Sir Anthony Mason, and finally, only in the last decade has the extent of royal involvement in Kerr’s decision become clear………………………………………….more https://theaimn.net/critical-archival-encounters-and-the-evolving-historiography-of-the-dismissal-of-the-whitlam-government-part
Sovereignty not worth a nickel?
A terse exchange between Greens Senator David Shoebridge and Vice Admiral Jonathan Mead during a Senate Estimates hearing earlier this year revealed that contracts signed by the Australian government that have handed billions of taxpayer dollars to American and British shipyards, supposedly to support the faster delivery of submarines, did not include standard protective clawback provisions.
If we never see a submarine—as is possible—we don’t get any of our billions back.
In influence and dollar terms, foreign-owned companies comprise the vastly dominant proportion of the industrial base, not “part of” it. Research by the Australian Strategic Policy Institute in 2017 showed that the top 15 weapons contractors received 91 per cent of the Department’s expenditure.
A decade of spin from both sides of politics has inured Australians to the stark reality of our loss of independence inside the US alliance. At what cost?
Michelle Fahy, Jan 12, 2025, https://undueinfluence.substack.com/p/sovereignty-not-worth-a-nickel?utm_source=post-email-title&publication_id=297295&post_id=154382292&utm_campaign=email-post-title&isFreemail=true&r=1ise1&triedRedirect=true&utm_medium=emailAustralia’s independence has been dangerously compromised by Labor and Coalition governments, which have signed up to deep-rooted military agreements with the United States of America. These agreements have also underpinned the increasing militarisation of Australia: witness the 2022 speech by Labor’s Richard Marles, the newly appointed deputy prime minister, in Washington DC when he announced that Australian military forces would now become interchangeable with those of the United States.
In August, after this year’s formal annual talks with the United States, Defence Minister Marles announced that the meeting had “built on the last two in seeing a deepening of American force posture in Australia”.
He added: “American force posture now in Australia involves every domain: land, sea, air, cyber and space.”
A decade of spin from both sides of politics has inured us to the stark reality of our loss of independence. Much is made of “defence industry cooperation” with the United States, for example, but this is simply code for the expansion of the US arms industry in Australia in support of its increasing military presence on our soil.
The day before AUKUS was launched in 2021, the US State Department made plain the importance of Australia in supporting America’s military-industrial base:
Australia is one of America’s largest defence customers, supporting thousands of jobs in the United States … The United States is Australia’s defence goods and services partner of choice … the partnership is expected to deepen further over the coming decade, including in the area of defence industry cooperation.
Soon after this statement was published, Marles flew to Washington to endorse its sentiment. He reassured the Americans that when it came to arms production, “our ultimate goal is to supplement and strengthen US industry and supply chains, not compete with them”.
Meanwhile, our much-trumpeted “sovereign defence industrial base” is simply a collection of the world’s top arms multinationals, dominated by the British-owned BAE Systems, the French-owned Thales, and the American-owned Boeing.
Then there is the egregious erosion of Australia’s sovereignty contained within the little-known Force Posture Agreement (FPA) with the United States, which the Abbott Coalition government signed in 2014.
In short, the FPA permits the US to prepare for, launch and control its own military operations from Australian territory.
Yet AUKUS dominates the headlines, even though other decisions by our political leaders that have sold out the public interest have received little coverage in the mainstream media.
A terse exchange between Greens Senator David Shoebridge and Vice Admiral Jonathan Mead during a Senate Estimates hearing earlier this year revealed that contracts signed by the Australian government that have handed billions of taxpayer dollars to American and British shipyards, supposedly to support the faster delivery of submarines, did not include standard protective clawback provisions. If we never see a submarine—as is possible—we don’t get any of our billions back.
The single most important downside of the US alliance, rarely mentioned, is arguably Australia’s military dependence on a foreign power. The Australian Defence Force is critically dependent on US supply and support for the conduct of all operations except those at the lowest level and of the shortest duration.
We were warned about this substantial sacrifice of national freedom of action. In 2001, a Parliamentary Library research paper stated that “it is almost literally true that Australia cannot go to war without the consent and support of the US”.
Foreign-dominated “sovereign” defence industry
Australia’s political and defence hierarchy regularly assert the need to build “a sovereign defence industrial base”. Most people would assume this to mean Australian-owned defence companies, with profits that stay local. This is not what the Defence Department means by it.
The world’s largest weapons companies, including BAE Systems (UK), Thales (France) and US companies Boeing, Lockheed Martin, Raytheon and Northrop Grumman, dominate the local defence industry. Almost all of the top 15 weapons contractors to the Defence Department are foreign-owned. In June 2024, Deputy Secretary Christopher Deeble, the head of the Capability Acquisition and Sustainment Group—the Department’s arms-buying group—explained in a Senate Estimates hearing the government’s definition of “sovereign” in this regard. Deeble agreed with independent senator David Pocock that the local subsidiaries of foreign weapons multinationals, such as Lockheed Martin Australia, were not “sovereign” Australian companies. Nevertheless, he said, the Department considers such foreign-owned subsidiaries to be “part of the sovereign defence industry base here in Australia”.
In influence and dollar terms, foreign-owned companies comprise the vastly dominant proportion of the industrial base, not “part of” it. Research by the Australian Strategic Policy Institute in 2017 showed that the top 15 weapons contractors received 91 per cent of the Department’s expenditure.
Force Posture Agreement
The erosion of Australian sovereignty accelerated in 2011, when Labor prime minister Julia Gillard agreed that up to 2,500 US Marines could be stationed in Darwin on a permanent rotation, and that an increased number of US military aircraft, including long range B-52 bombers, could fly in and out of the Top End and use Australia’s outback bombing ranges.
This agreement was expanded dramatically a few years later by the Force Posture Agreement, which provides the legal basis for an extensive militarisation of Australia by the US, particularly across the Top End.
The tri-nation military pact AUKUS, between Australia, the United Kingdom and the United States, was later negotiated and agreed to, in secret, by the Morrison Coalition government. AUKUS gained bipartisan support within one day of it being revealed to Anthony Albanese’s Labor opposition in September 2021. Among other things, AUKUS, in conjunction with the FPA, ensures that Australia’s navy will be tightly integrated with the US navy for the purpose of fighting China, and that the two navies can operate as one from Australian ports and waters.
Two months after Labor assumed office in May 2022, Marles was in Washington DC announcing that Labor would “continue the ambitious trajectory of its force posture cooperation” with the United States. Australia’s engagement with the US military would “move beyond interoperability to interchangeability” and Australia would “ensure we have all the enablers in place to operate seamlessly together, at speed”.
Non-lethal” F-35 parts
Australia’s newest high-tech major weapons systems make us more reliant than ever on the United States. As veteran journalist Brian Toohey reported in 2020, “The US … denies Australia access to the computer source code essential to operate key electronic components in its ships, planes, missiles, sensors and so on”. This includes the F-35 fighter jets, which both Foreign Minister Penny Wong and Defence Minister Marles have noted form the largest proportion of the air force’s fast jet capacity.
When it agreed to buy Lockheed Martin’s expensive and controversial fifth generation fighter jets, Australia became one of the early members of the F-35 consortium. As part of the deal, Australia negotiated a role for local industry in the F-35 global supply chain. As of June 2024, more than 75 Australian companies had shared in $4.6 billion worth of work, according to the Defence Department.
But there’s been a significant ethical downside. Israel, also a member of the F-35 consortium, is using its F-35s in its war against Gaza. Israel stands accused in the world’s highest court of conducting a genocide in Gaza. Every F-35 built contains Australian parts and components, and for some of these Australia is the sole source.
A senior Defence Department official, Hugh Jeffrey, said in a Senate Estimates hearing in June 2024:
“We are a member of the F-35 consortium [which] exists under a memorandum of understanding … That gives the defence industry opportunity to contribute to that supply chain. It also requires Australia to provide those contributions in good faith…” [emphasis added]
Jeffrey also noted that when assessing any export permit, “we have to have high confidence that, in agreeing to the permit, it’s consistent with our national security requirements and with our international legal obligations”.
What happens if the Department perceives a conflict between Australia’s “national security requirements” and its “international legal obligations”? Is Australia “required” to continue supplying Australian-made arms “in good faith”?
In June, after nine months of spreading disinformation, the Australian government was forced to admit that Australia was still supplying parts and components to the F-35 global supply chain. At the time of writing, the government was allowing this supply to continue despite repeated calls from the UN asking nations—and multinational weapons makers—to cease supplying weapons to Israel, including parts and components, or risk being responsible under international law for serious human rights violations.
Decoded: Defence Department’s deadly deceits
Michelle Fahy, July 10, 2024
Judge Orders Britain’s Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) to Come Clean on Deleted Assange Docs
A judge in London has ruled that Britain’s Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) must explain what happened to certain documents in the Julian Assange case that it claims no longer exist, reports Joe Lauria.
By Joe Lauria, Consortium News, January 10, 2025, https://consortiumnews.com/2025/01/10/judge-orders-cps-to-come-clean-on-deleted-assange-docs/
Italian journalist Stefania Maurizi has been waging a legal battle for seven years against the Crown Prosecution Service to discover the truth about a CPS claim that it deleted a number of documents Maurizi has sought in a Freedom of Information request about the case of Julian Assange.
Now a judge on the London First-tier Tribunal has ruled that the CPS must explain to Maurizi what it knows about when, why and how the documents were allegedly destroyed. The Jan. 2 ruling was first reported by Maurizi’s newspaper il Fatto Quotidiano on Friday.
Judge Penrose Foss has given the CPS until Feb. 21 to respond or it could be held in contempt of court.
The ruling says:
The Crown Prosecution Service must, by no later than 4.00 p.m. on 21 February 2025:
- (1) Confirm to the Appellant whether it held recorded information as to when, how and why any hard or electronic copies of emails referred to in the Appellant’s request to the Crown Prosecution Service of 12 December 2019 were deleted;
- (2) If it did hold such information, either supply the information to the Appellant by 4.00 p.m. on 21 February 2025 or serve a refusal notice under section 17 of the Freedom of Information Act 2000, identifying the grounds on which the Crown Prosecution Service relies.A failure to comply with this Substituted Decision Notice could lead to contempt proceedings.”
Swedish Case
The documents Maurizi seeks were in relation to Sweden’s request to the U.K. for Assange’s extradition.
Her argument was heard before the three judges of the tribunal on Sept. 24, 2024. The allegedly deleted emails involved a CPS exchange with Sweden about a Swedish prosecutor’s attempt, beginning in 2010, to extradite the WikiLeaks publisher from Britain.
Assange was wanted at the time in Sweden for questioning during a preliminary investigation into allegations of sexual assault, which was dropped three times, definitively in 2017. He was never charged. After losing his battle against extradition to Sweden at the U.K. Supreme Court, Assange took refuge in the Ecuadorian embassy in June 2012, fearing that Sweden would send him to the United States.
Assange spent seven years in the embassy protecting himself from arrest until April 2019, when British police dragged him from the diplomatic mission and threw him into London’s maximum security Belmarsh prison.
It was only when the U.S. realized it would lose on appeal after a four-year extradition battle that the Department of Justice cut a plea deal with Assange who was released on June 24, 2024 and returned to his native Australia.
Assange had been charged in the United States under the Espionage Act for possessing and publishing defense information, which revealed evidence of U.S. war crimes. Britain took an active role in Assange’s prosecution.
In the earlier Swedish case, the CPS sought to stop Sweden from going to the embassy to question him.
Seeking to learn more about Britain’s role, Maurizi first made a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request in 2015 for all emails between the British and Swedish governments concerning Assange.
Some of the emails she obtained showed political motivation on the part of the lead British prosecutor, Paul Close.
One email Maurizi obtained from the Swedish Prosecution Authority (SPA) revealed that Close appeared to be pressuring Swedish prosecutors to continue seeking Assange’s extradition instead of dropping the case or questioning him at the Ecuadorian embassy, where Assange had been granted asylum.
“My earlier advice remains, that in my view it would not be prudent for the Swedish authorities to try to interview the defendant [Julian Assange] in the UK,” Close wrote to the SPA, in 2011, according to one of the emails obtained by Maurizi.
Keir Starmer, the British prime minister, was head of the CPS at this time. He led the service from 2008 to 2013, though it is unknown what role Starmer may have played in this correspondence.
“Don’t you dare get cold feet!!!,” he wrote to Marianne Ny, Sweden’s director of public prosecutions, in 2012. A year after that, Close wrote, “Please do not think this case is being dealt with as just another extradition.”
After Maurizi noticed a sizeable gap in the emails released to her she filed another FIOA seeking to obtain the missing emails.
The CPS first claimed that it had destroyed the emails. It said that when Close retired, his account along with his emails, were automatically destroyed.
But Maurizi did not buy it. She asked the court at the hearing last month to order the CPS to turn over “metadata” — data about data, such as file creation and modification dates, email sender and recipient addresses, timestamps, email routing information, keywords, and subject lines — proving the emails really were deleted and when.
“We have NO certainty whatsoever” that the emails were destroyed, Maurizi wrote in a message to Consortium News. Maurizi went to court because she believes the allegedly deleted emails could provide additional evidence of a politically motivated prosecution of Assange.
She also wants metadata on a CPS document that it says is from 2012 explaining the CPS’ email deletion policy, which was only sent to her in 2023.
The supposed 2012 policy document says that 30 days after an email account is disabled, the “email data” associated with it “will be automatically deleted and no longer accessible.”
“How is it possible that they provided this document only in 2023, after multiple requests, multiple appeals, no-one ever mentioned it or knew about it?” Maurizi told CN.
Such a policy does not explain why thousands of emails related to an ongoing case would be deleted.
Denied on the Metadata
In order to figure out whether the 2012 policy document on deletions is genuine, Maurizi requested the relevant metadata of the file. She wanted to make sure it was not created years later as an attempt at retroactively justifying the deletion of Close’s emails.
Judge Foss for the Tribunal, however, ruled against Maurizi on the release of the metadata. Foss ruled
“In our view there was nothing in the letter or spirit of the 2019 Request as to when, how and why the emails of the CPS lawyer were deleted, which required the CPS to disclose the metadata of any document which substantiated the information it provided in response to that request. […]
It would be extraordinary, in our view, if every time a public authority was presented with a request for information recorded in such a way as to have meant that the creation of that record generated metadata, the request should be taken inevitably to require the metadata behind the form of record.”
Unsatisfactory Explanations
It is simply “not credible” Maurizi’s lawyer argued during the September hearing that Close neither sent nor received emails to Swedish prosecutors when Sweden issued the arrest warrant for Assange; when Assange took refuge in the embassy; and when he was granted asylum by Ecuador.
“[I]t has never been established that there was anything untoward in those gaps, that there were emails that weren’t published,” argued Rory Dunlop KC, on behalf of the prosecution authority, during his closing remarks.
“The CPS are keen to make clear that it has never been accepted and [it has] never been established one way or another,” he insisted. Over the years, in response to FOIA requests and appeals, the CPS’ position on the deletion of Close’s account has varied.
For example, in 2017, after Maurizi challenged the gap in the emails, a CPS employee said in a witness statement that, “If there ever existed further emails they were not printed off and filed” and therefore “are no longer in the possession of the CPS.”
According to an article by Maurizi in il Fatto Quotidiano, five years later, the CPS said in response to a separate FOIA request from Labour MP John McDonnell that “deletion of an email account of a former member of staff at the time would not have led to the deletion of emails held on the case file.”
The CPS also admitted to McDonnell that they are only aware of one other case in the last decade which resulted in the premature destruction of case materials, according to Maurizi’s article.
The Sept. 24 tribunal also heard that the CPS’ Records Management Manual states that general correspondence “should be retained in the case file within five years from the date of the most recent correspondence,” which would not allow for deletion upon retirement by the prosecutor on the case.
Mohamed Elmaazi contributed to this article.
Critical Archival Encounters and the Evolving Historiography of the Dismissal of the Whitlam Government (Part 4)
COMMENT. This is heavy stuff.
I include it because it goes to explain how it came about that the USA pretty much owns Australia. USA has pretty much owned every Prime Minister since Whitlam.
Gough Whitlam had the guts to question the value of USA’s Pine Gap military intelligence hub.
So he paid the price for his courage
January 10, 2025 AIMN Editorial, By Jenny Hocking, Continued from Part 3
Kerr always claimed that the decision to dismiss the Whitlam government was his alone, that the leader of the opposition, Malcolm Fraser, did not know and that he had spoken to the High Court Chief Justice Sir Garfield Barwick only after he had reached his decision, and that the Palace was in no way involved. Sir Martin Charteris wrote on the Queen’s behalf to the Speaker, Gordon Scholes, soon after the dismissal; “The Queen has no part in the decisions which the Governor-General must take in accordance with the Constitution”.
This narrative of the Governor-General faced with an impossible decision and with no other option available but to dismiss the elected government, was well captured by the Sydney Morning Herald’s editorial the following day: “the course he [Kerr] has taken was the only course open to him”. In its recitation of Kerr’s statement of reasons, released within hours of the dismissal, the editorial makes no mention of the half-Senate election despite its pronouncement on whether other options were available to Kerr.
The invisibility of the half-Senate election is one of the notable features of much of the immediate commentary. Which is all the more puzzling since Whitlam was at Yarralumla on 11 November in order to call the half-Senate election, as Kerr well knew. Yet, in his statement of reasons, Kerr made scant reference to it and indeed misrepresented the half-Senate election in a way that then carried into much of the historical assessments to come………………………………………………………………………………………………………………….
Whitlam was due to announce the half-Senate election to the House of Representatives on the afternoon of 11 November 1975, and his signed letter to Kerr setting out the details for it was in his hand as he arrived in the Governor-General’s study. It can be found today among Kerr’s papers in the National Archives, with Kerr’s handwritten notation in the upper right corner: “the recommendation was not made”. The early histories of the dismissal were unaware of just how close Whitlam had been to calling the half-Senate election, some see it only as an option considered and not taken, while others fail to mention it at all.
………………………… The half-Senate election takes its place as a critical dismissal moment much overlooked by historical assessments, alongside the 1974 double dissolution election and the motion of no confidence in Malcolm Fraser two hours after his appointment as Prime Minister.
……………………………………………………. In a strident editorial rebuke “Sir John was wrong”, The Age alone among the immediate commentaries on Kerr’s precipitate action, which it termed his “Yarralumla coup d’etat”, implicitly invoked Hasluck’s response in 1974 of granting the election pending the passage of supply:
We are not convinced the decision he [Kerr] took was the only one open to him, or that it was necessary to take it now […] we should like to know if Sir John considered the possibility of urging Mr. Fraser to allow the Senate to pass interim Supply so that a half-Senate election could be held.
Central to the narrative of lonely inevitability, Fraser and Kerr repeatedly denied having any prior contact or warning before the dismissal,
…………………… after a decade of denial Fraser admitted his prior knowledge of the dismissal and his agreement on the terms of his appointment with Kerr. …………………..
………………………………………………………………………………It is an understatement to say that this shared agreement between the Governor-General and the soon to be appointed Prime Minister lacking the confidence of the House, regarding a policy decision directly affecting the Governor-General himself, raises serious political, ethical, and constitutional issues………………………………………………………. more https://theaimn.net/critical-archival-encounters-and-the-evolving-historiography-of-the-dismissal-of-the-whitlam-government-part-4/
Los Angeles fire a wake up call for Australia
COMMENT. Let’s be aware of the danger to nuclear facilities. The Santa Susana Field Laboratory is located approximately 18 miles (29 km) northwest of Hollywood and approximately 30 miles (48 km) northwest of Downtown Los Angeles. The hot lab suffered a number of fires involving radioactive materials. For example, in 1957, a fire in the hot cell “got out of control and … massive contamination” resulted. A radioactive fire occurred in 1971, involving combustible primary reactor coolant (NaK) contaminated with mixed fission products. The 2018 Woolsey Fire began at SSFL and burned about 80% of the site.
In 2021, the three hour documentary In the Dark of the Valley depicted mothers advocating for cleanup of the site who have children suffering from cancer believed to be caused by the contamination. This could happen in Australia, if Peter Dutton’s foolish nuclear scheme ever came to pass.
January 9, 2025, Friends of the Earth Australia, https://theaimn.net/los-angeles-fire-a-wake-up-call-for-australia/
The fires currently tearing through Los Angeles are a reminder that Australia can no longer rely on northern hemisphere nations for water-bombing aircraft and firefighters during our summer.
“During our Black Summer, more than 1,000 people came from North America to assist in firefighting efforts. Australia recently sent multiple teams to assist with the fires in North America. This sharing of resources, including aircraft, firefighters and specialists, is how we fight fires in the 21st century” said Friends of the Earth campaigns co-ordinator Cam Walker. “And the fact that fires are raging in mid winter in the USA highlights that the world has entered a new phase – the era of the pyrocene – and that our old ways of fighting fires needs to change.”
Normally Australia leases up to six Large Air Tankers (LATs) which are each allocated to a specific state or territory, but which are shared around the country according to greatest need. While we need up to 7 LATs in a bad fire season, we only own one (which is owned by the NSW Rural Fire Service) and we now lease one year round.
The other planes are leased in after their post season maintenance in the northern hemisphere. They all come from North America and arrive in the country during the traditional ‘shoulder’ season. This shoulder is rapidly disappearing as planes are needed for larger sections of the year in each hemisphere.
“As fire seasons extend in both hemispheres, we face the risk of being unable to secure leases for LATs in coming years”.
There is a clear link between the current fires around LA and climate change. For instance, a 2016 study found climate change enhanced the drying of organic matter and doubled the number of large fires between 1984 and 2015 in the western United States (source: NOAA).
After the Royal Commission into Natural Disaster Arrangements that was held to reflect on the lessons of the 2019-20 Black Summer fire season, the commission recommended (Rec 8.1) that the federal government create ‘an Australian-based and registered national aerial firefighting capability, to be tasked according to greatest national need”. In responding to the commission, the federal government decided not pursue the possibility of Australia establishing its own fleet of LATs.
The commission also noted that “extreme weather has already become more frequent and intense because of climate change (and that) further global warming over the next 20 to 30 years is inevitable”.
Mr Walker continued: “In light of all the available science about longer and more intense fire seasons in both hemispheres and the increased difficulty of securing LATs on lease from North America, the federal government must commit to establishing an Australian owned fleet of LATs before the 2025/26 budget”.
The current federal government has taken firefighting capacity seriously and provided significant funding for water-bombing aircraft. With a review of aerial firefighting capability currently underway (expected to report back later this year) now is the right time to acknowledge the reality that we are facing and commit to buying a sovereign fleet of LATs that will be permanently based in Australia.
In addition to buying a fleet of publicly owned LATs, Australia must:
- Stop contributing to even worse global heating, which will continue to lengthen fire seasons and other negative climate change impacts. In the first instance it must stop exporting vast volumes of fossil fuels
- Fast track the development of new technology that will ensure rapid detection of new start fires
- Investigate establishing a national remote area firefighting team which could be deployed as needed to assist state and territory firefighting efforts.
A national remote area firefighting team. As fire threatens World Heritage Areas and national parks across the country, it is time to establish a national remote area firefighting team, which would be funded by the federal government and tasked with supporting existing crews in the states and territories.
Long fire seasons stretch local resources, and sometimes remote areas such as national parks need to be abandoned in order to focus on defending human assets. Having an additional, mobile national team that could be deployed quickly to areas of greatest need would help us protect the wonderful legacy of national parks and World Heritage Areas across the country.
This was recommended by a Senate inquiry after the devastating fires in Tasmania of 2016.
Critical Archival Encounters and the Evolving Historiography of the Dismissal of the Whitlam Government (Part 2)
I will never forget the day when I, living in a country area, ran to answer a phone call. It was my mother, in the faraway city. And I’ll never forget her exact words: “The queen’s man has sacked our elected Prime Minister!”
My Mum summed it up. Later, I have realised that this was a case of the UK government toeing the line of the USA government, and making sure that Australia got that USA military intelligence hub, Pine Gap.
January 8, 2025 AIMN Editorial, By Jenny Hocking
Continued from Part 1
After years of legal action, still absent from public view are crucial documents from a most contentious time in British imperial history: the 1947 and 1948 diaries covering the Mountbattens’ shared involvements in pre-Independence India, transition and partition, among “scores of other files” not yet released.
These remain locked away, and Lownie has spent £250,000 of his own funds in pursuit of public access to papers which constituted a purportedly public archive, while the Cabinet office has spent £180,000 keeping them secret. Particularly disquieting is Lownie’s recent claims that he has himself become the target of security surveillance as he continues to pursue the closed Mountbatten files.
Somewhere among those voluminous Mountbatten papers are letters between Mountbatten and the Governor-General, Sir John Kerr, about the dismissal of the Whitlam government. These letters were briefly cited by Mountbatten’s authorised biographer Philip Ziegler in which Mountbatten declared that he “much admired” Kerr’s “courageous and constitutionally correct” action in dismissing Gough Whitlam.
Several years ago, I visited Southampton University hoping to see Mountbatten’s dismissal correspondence with Kerr since, as discussed below, bizarre circumstance means that it no longer exists in Kerr’s papers in the National Archives of Australia. Although Ziegler had been granted access and had quoted from Mountbatten’s congratulatory letter to Kerr, I was denied access to the diaries and letters. Instead, I was handed some thin, rather desultory files containing a handful of itineraries, dinner placements, menus, and invitations to Mountbatten during his visit to Australia. No diaries and certainly no letters between Mountbatten and Kerr.
……………………………In relation to Kerr’s secret correspondence with the Queen, “the Palace letters” regarding the dismissal, it was the use of this uniquely powerful word in the archival lexicon – “personal” – that had placed the letters outside the reach of the Archives Act 1983 and necessitated an arduous Federal Court action to challenge their continued closure. Livsey notes in relation to the migrated Kenyan archive that the construction of “regimes of secrecy” in which the label “personal” was used to control access to and knowledge of British colonial practice; “files labelled ‘Personal’ could be consulted by white British officials only and ‘should not be sighted by local eyes’”…………………..
Lownie’s now four-year legal battle has been described as eerily similar to the Palace letters legal action which I took against the National Archives of Australia in 2016, arguing that the Queen’s correspondence with the Governor-General was not personal, and seeking its release. The case ended in the High Court in 2020 with a resounding 6:1 decision in my favour, the Court ruling that the Palace letters are, as I had argued, not personal and that they are Commonwealth records and come under the open access provisions of the Archives Act. The letters were released in full in July 2020, in a striking rebuff to the claimed convention of royal secrecy on which the Archives had in part relied.
…………………………………….. At its most significant, the denial of access to royal documents as “personal” enables the sophistry that the monarch remains politically neutral at all times to persist……………….
…………Although the Queen was publicly a careful adherent of that core requirement of neutrality, something the “meddling Prince” Charles most assertively was and is not, Hocking argues that “the much vaunted political neutrality is a myth, enabled and perpetuated by secrecy”. Professor Anne Twomey similarly notes that “If neutrality can only be maintained by secrecy, this implies that it does not, in fact, exist”.
Our own history gives us a powerful example of the way in which archival secrecy functions as a Royal protector, casting a veil over breaches of the claimed political neutrality of the Crown, in the changing historiography of the dismissal of the Whitlam government. ……………………….
For decades, the dismissal history was constrained by the impenetrable barrier of “Royal secrecy” which denied us access firstly, to any of Kerr’s correspondence with the Queen, ………………………………………….
Sir John Kerr’s abrupt dismissal, without warning, of the Whitlam government on 11 November 1975 just as Whitlam was to call a half-Senate election, was an unprecedented use of the Governor-General’s reserve powers and “one of the most controversial and tumultuous events in the modern history of the nation”, as the Federal Court described it.
These powers, derived from those of an autocratic Monarch untroubled by parliamentary sovereignty and even less by the electoral expression of the popular will, had not been used in England for nearly two hundred years, and never in Australia…………………………………………………………………. more https://theaimn.net/critical-archival-encounters-and-the-evolving-historiography-of-the-dismissal-of-the-whitlam-government-part-2/
Jenny Hocking is emeritus professor at Monash University, Distinguished Whitlam Fellow at the Whitlam Institute at Western Sydney University and award-winning biographer of Gough Whitlam. Her latest book is The Palace Letters: The Queen, the governor-general, and the plot to dismiss Gough Whitlam. You can follow Jenny on X @palaceletters.
PM sharpens attack on nuclear in election-style tour
Maitland Mercury, By Kat Wong and Tess Ikonomou, January 7 2025 –
Anthony Albanese is testing new lines of attack as he hurtles through key battlegrounds ahead of an official election campaign.
The prime minister has embarked a whirlwind tour of Queensland, the Northern Territory and Western Australia just months before voters are expected to go to the polls.
A federal election must be held by late May and, while Mr Albanese is yet to pull the trigger, the trip might be seen as a soft campaign launch………………………………………………….
Labor has renewed its offensive against the opposition’s $330 billion bid to set up seven nuclear reactors.
It initially aimed its criticism at safety and environment concerns, leaning on the nuclear fears of older generations.
But its latest attack highlights cost, viability and time, with a particular focus on economic consequences for the Sunshine State.
Fresh analysis released by Labor shows the coalition’s plan assumes it will cost Queensland more than $872 billion in lost output by 2050 and treasurer Jim Chalmers said Mr Dutton’s “economic madness” would leave Queensland households worse off.
“As a Queenslander, I won’t sit back and watch Peter Dutton push energy prices up and growth down right across the state,” he said…………………………………………………………… more https://www.maitlandmercury.com.au/story/8860529/pm-sharpens-attack-on-nuclear-in-election-style-tour/
The continual cover up – Jenny Hocking on the strange disappearance of Gough Whitlam’s ASIO file
January 5, 2025 , Australian Independent Media, By Jenny Hocking
And it is not just Gough Whitlam’s ASIO file that has been “culled” by the National Archives of Australia. The relevant Government House Guest Books at the time of the Dismissal have disappeared and the entire archive of Kerr’s prominent supporters, including Lord Mountbatten, was accidentally burnt in the Yarralumla incinerator.
I was made sharply aware of the conceptual and physical fragility of archives as historical representation 20 years ago through a chance encounter, or more precisely a lost encounter, with Gough Whitlam’s Australian Security Intelligence Organisation (ASIO) file. I had stumbled onto Whitlam’s security file quite unexpectedly through a reference to it in another, unrelated, file. Clearly, any file maintained by the domestic security service on Gough Whitlam would be a critically important historical record in itself, and even more so given the Whitlam government’s fractious relationship with the security services and the well-known surveillance excesses of ASIO and the state Special Branches at that time.
To find evidence of the existence of an ASIO file on Whitlam that I had never expected was a rare moment of archival anticipation. That anticipation was dashed four months later when the Archives informed me that, having maintained this security file for nearly 40 years, it had been destroyed in a routine culling, just weeks before I requested it. Although Archives assured me that, according to ASIO’s records, the now destroyed file “contained material of a vetting nature only”, this is now impossible to verify. A request for access to the ASIO documents referred to in this response and on which this claim about the nature of the file was based, went unanswered.
As a former Prime Minister, Whitlam was a recognised “Commonwealth Person”, for the purposes of the Archives management systems. These are “individuals who have had a close association with the Commonwealth” and whose records are therefore expressly collected and preserved for history. Notwithstanding that acknowledged significance, the Archives had issued an authorisation for ASIO to destroy Whitlam’s security file within weeks of my request to view it. It brings to mind Blouin’s arch observation that “a historian working in state archives, particularly on topics related to the recent past, is constantly engaged in some way in a struggle with the politics of state-protected knowledge”.
The misplaced destruction of Whitlam’s security file compounds the unsettled history of the dismissal by allowing the circulation of competing speculations over its coincident erasure: was this a vetting file as ASIO stated, did the file identify agents or surveillance methods, would its release have led to files on other members of the Whitlam government? This latter is no idle speculation. ASIO was already monitoring deputy Prime Minister Dr Jim Cairns, whose ASIO “dossier” was sensationally leaked to The Bulletin in 1974, causing immense damage to the Whitlam government and to Cairns personally. The possibility of security files on other ministers and even on Whitlam himself is only stirred by the deliberate destruction of ASIO’s vetting file. In the absence of the file itself an already clouded history becomes further compromised.
It was this episode that introduced me to the force of what Elkins terms “archival scepticism” in archive-based research. Whatever the reason for its apparent destruction, the Archives had successfully removed Whitlam’s ASIO file from public view and therefore from the consideration of history. In doing so it had played an important role in the construction of the dismissal in history, in which a security file on Gough Whitlam does not and cannot now feature. This underscores precisely, if there were any doubt about this, that archives are not neutral replicators of documented history, but politicised re-creators of it.
The Lost Archive: Government House Guest Books
In 2010, I first requested access to the Government House guest books held by the Archives, which provide the details of visits and visitors to “their Excellencies” at Yarralumla………………………….. The guest books appear regularly from July 1961 until July 1974, before stopping altogether until December 1982.
…………………………………………. The guest books for 1975 are now officially lost.
These missing guest books add fuel to the longstanding speculation that security and defence officials, notably the Chief Defence Scientist Dr John Farrands as the recognised authority on Pine Gap and the Joint Facilities, had briefed Kerr in the week before the dismissal about mounting security and defence concerns over Whitlam’s exposure of CIA agents working at Pine Gap, and his planned Prime Ministerial statement on this in the House of Representatives on the afternoon of 11 November 1975. ……………………………………….
The Burnt Archive: Sir John Kerr’s Prominent Supporters
In 1978, soon after Kerr left office, a cache of letters “of outstanding value” to Kerr was accidentally reduced to ashes in the Yarralumla incinerator………………………………
Kerr had sought these congratulatory letters for use in his forthcoming autobiography Matters for Judgement. Among his correspondents was the Queen’s second cousin, Lord Louis Mountbatten, Prince Philip’s uncle and King Charles III’s great mentor; the former Governor-General and distant royal relation, Viscount De L’Isle; and other prominent individuals supporting Kerr’s dismissal of Whitlam. These names alone indicate that these burnt letters were as important to history as they were to Kerr. Were it not for this secondary file of correspondence between Smith and Kerr detailing the saga of the “burnt letters”, the existence and apparent inflammatory end of Kerr’s correspondence with his minor aristocratic supporters would never have come to light. The letters themselves now never will.
Philip Ziegler’s authorised biography of Mountbatten, however, gives just a glimpse of this story. Ziegler recounts that Mountbatten wrote to Kerr days after the dismissal, congratulating him on his “courageous and correct action” in dismissing Whitlam. It was a remarkably partisan royal intercession, and Mountbatten was not alone among Kerr’s royal supporters. We now know, thanks to letters released in 2020 following the High Court’s decision in my legal action, that King Charles also fully supported Kerr’s actions. Charles’s letter to Kerr, written in starkly similar terms to Mountbatten’s weeks after the dismissal, leaves no doubt of Charles’s support for Kerr; “What you did […] was right and the courageous thing to do.”
As Kerr later wrote to the South Australian lieutenant-governor, Sir Walter Crocker, “I never had any doubt as to what the Palace’s attitude was on this important point.”
*************************
These are extracts from Professor Jenny Hocking’s essay ‘Critical Archival Encounters and the Evolving Historiography of the Dismissal of the Whitlam Government’, Australian Journal of Politics and History, 11 April 2024.
Open access publishing facilitated by Monash University, as part of the Wiley – Monash University agreement via the Council of Australian University Librarians. This article was originally published on Pearls and Irritations and has been republished with permission. https://theaimn.net/the-continual-cover-up-jenny-hocking-on-the-strange-disappearance-of-gough-whitlams-asio-file/
The polar playground for a suicidal species?
https://theaimn.net/the-polar-playground-for-a-suicidal-species/ 7 January 25
Where to begin on this mind-boggling story about epic changes on a very small planet?
Well, let’s begin on the fun part. The Australian Antarctic Program encourages some pretty innocuous recreational activities, plus of course, encouragement for tourists to come, and to learn about the polar world. So that’s OK, I suppose. But lately, in the news, there is growing concern that tourists, Australians in particular, are taking such a playful attitude to Antarctica, that they are risking their personal safety.
Interesting that the video above puts the blame on TikTok for encouraging the fun and danger. But tourism itself is good for increasing education about Antarctica. As long as individuals personally behave safely, that’s fine, isn’t it?
But what about planetary safety?
What Australians, and most of the world, learn about Antarctica, is that it’s pretty, and has penguins, Oh, and the ice is melting a bit, too. And that’s about it. The media does not trouble our complacent little minds with information about the thermohaline ocean circulation, the atmospheric circulation patterns, the carbon-sequestration of krill, the polar vortex…. Much too hard for us, in this cricket-tennis season.
Right now, Northern Europe and parts of the USA are experiencing extreme cold weather. No doubt some people would say that this disproves global heating, climate change. Alas, these extremes, emanating from the Arctic, by the polar vortex, are exacerbated by global heating. The polar vortex is a complex system, difficult to grasp, for the average news reader, so it is part of the whole poorly known, global climate system.
Antarctica is at the other end of the world – not connected to all this? Well, not if you ignore the global thermohaline circulation, among other things like sea level rise.
Global thermohaline circulation
Professor Elisabeth Leane, Professor of Antarctic Studies at the University of Tasmania says – What happens in Antarctica doesn’t stay in Antarctica. Its future will shape the future of the planet
Which brings me to the question of safety in relation to Antarctica – planetary, not just personal.
And here’s what the University of Tasmania says about it – Antarctica’s tipping points threaten global climate stability.
The map above is from the University of Tasmania’s report by international climate scientists . It identifies the various cascading tipping points and their interactions and pressures on the ecosystem.
For those who care about the climate change issue, and about Australia and the Antarctic, I would urge them to watch, and persist with, this brilliant report by climate researcher Paul Beckwith – https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6WccDhnM8R8
Beckwith explains the potential tipping points identified by the study and their interrelationships , and adds the issue of sea ice loss. Critical issues are ice sheets, ocean acidification, ocean circulation, species redistribution, invasive species, permafrost melting, local pollution, chemical impacts, social impacts, local pollution and the Antarctic Treaty System. He goes on to explain with excellent graphics, the global thermohaline circulation, and then, in-depth, the records on sea ice, and then on to his detailed study on the tiny krill or light shrimp, and their global importance. Finally, Beckwith outlines the politics, the various national claims in the Antarctic Treaty System. The scientists’ conclusion – the urgent need for action on climate. Heavy stuff. Fascinating stuff. He finishes with a reminder of the unique role of that amazing critter the krill.
If you want a more concise discussion of the University of Tasmania’s December remarkable workshop of international marine scientists – go to Radio Ecoshock – World-changing Tipping Points – In Antarctica !
The “mainstream media” rarely covers climate change in any depth. For decades, the public has been informed very superficially on this life and death matter for our survival. The dedicated scientists produce their research results, but the media seem to find these too difficult, or too “political” to bother to report on them properly. The December 2024 “emergency summit” of international polar scientists in Tasmania barely got a mention in the Australian or international press.
You have to go to alternative media, to get any real insight into what is happening to the climate of our planet home. For decades now, Paul Beckwith has being producing his highly informative and wonderfully illustrated videos, on Youtube. Meanwhile Alex Smith has been doing the same sort of thing on radio and podcast, and print, – on Radio Ecoshock, which is heard in Australia on Community Radio 3CR.
In 2025, it is ever more urgent for people to wade through the morass of “social” media, and corporate media, and “alternative” media, to find the facts on climate change. Paul Beckwith and Radio Ecoshock are two examples of a rare and endangered human species – journalists who do their homework on climate change.
Could AI soon make dozens of billion-dollar nuclear stealth attack submarines more expensive and obsolete?
By Wayne Williams, 5 Jan 25, https://www.techradar.com/pro/could-ai-soon-make-dozens-of-billion-dollar-nuclear-stealth-attack-submarines-more-expensive-and-obsolete
Artificial intelligence can detect undersea movement better than humans.
AI can process far more data from a far more sensors than human operators can ever achieve
But the game of cat-and-mouse means that countermeasures do exist to confuse AI
Increase in compute performance and ubiquity of always-on passive sensors need also be accounted for.
The rise of AI is set to reduce the effectiveness of nuclear stealth attack submarines.
These advanced billion-dollar subs, designed to operate undetected in hostile waters, have long been at the forefront of naval defense. However, AI-driven advancements in sensor technology and data analysis are threatening their covert capabilities, potentially rendering them less effective.
An article by Foreign Policy and IEEE Spectrum now claims AI systems can process vast amounts of data from distributed sensor networks, far surpassing the capabilities of human operators. Quantum sensors, underwater surveillance arrays, and satellite-based imaging now collect detailed environmental data, while AI algorithms can identify even subtle anomalies, such as disturbances caused by submarines. Unlike human analysts, who might overlook minor patterns, AI excels at spotting these tiny shifts, increasing the effectiveness of detection systems.
Game of cat-and-mouse
AI’s increasing role could challenge the stealth of submarines like those in the Virginia-class, which rely on sophisticated engineering to minimize their detectable signatures.
Noise-dampening tiles, vibration-reducing materials, and pump-jet propulsors are designed to evade detection, but AI-enabled networks are increasingly adept at overcoming these methods. The ubiquity of passive sensors and continuous improvements in computational performance are increasing the reach and resolution of these detection systems, creating an environment of heightened transparency in the oceans.
Despite these advances, the game of cat-and-mouse persists, as countermeasures are, inevitably, being developed to outwit AI detection.
These tactics, as explored in the Foreign Policy and IEEE Spectrum piece, include noise-camouflaging techniques that mimic natural marine sounds, deploying uncrewed underwater vehicles (UUVs) to create diversions, and even cyberattacks aimed at corrupting the integrity of AI algorithms. Such methods seek to confuse and overwhelm AI systems, maintaining an edge in undersea warfare.
As AI technology evolves, nations will need to weigh up the escalating costs of nuclear stealth submarines against the potential for their obsolescence. Countermeasures may provide temporary degree of relief, but the increasing prevalence of passive sensors and AI-driven analysis suggests that traditional submarine stealth is likely to face diminishing returns in the long term.
1 This month
Chernobyl: The Lost Tapes – A good documentary on Chernobyl on SBS available On Demand for the next 3 weeks– https://www.sbs.com.au/ondemand/tv-program/chernobyl-the-lost-tapes/235274195556
21 April Webinar: No Nuclear Weapons in Australia
Start: 2026-04-21 18:00:00 UTC Canberra, Melbourne, Sydney (GMT+10:00)
End: 2026-04-21 19:30:00 UTC Canberra, Melbourne, Sydney (GMT+10:00)
Event Type: Virtual
A virtual link will be communicated before the event.
Host Contact Info: australia@icanw.org
of the week – Australians for War Powers Reform (AWPR)
To see nuclear-related stories in greater depth and intensity
Antinuclear 