Antinuclear

Tim Wilson, secretive money and “think” tanks. Australia’s democracy is at stake.

April 18, 2025 Lucy Hamilton, https://theaimn.net/tim-wilson-secretive-money-and-think-tanks-australias-democracy-is-at-stake/

Advance’s links to Australia’s Atlas Network partners were laid out by Dr Jeremy Walker in the Voice campaign. Its origin and links to the Liberal Party as well as the global thinktank operation was explored in detail in the Sydney Morning Herald. That report also illustrates the body’s links to Zionist operations, fostered through its co-founder David Adler. It has three new front groups to discredit the Greens: Greens Truth, Her Truth and Election News.

There are as many as 18 such shadowy organisations acting against renewables and in favour of nuclear energy at the moment. Most can be found on social media targeting key seats. Others can afford billboards.

April 18, 2025 Lucy Hamilton, https://theaimn.net/tim-wilson-secretive-money-and-think-tanks-australias-democracy-is-at-stake/

Australians should remember, as the election approaches, that Tim Wilson was shortlisted in 2015 for the US-based Atlas Network’s most prestigious prize. He and his team at the Atlas Network-partner the Institute of Public Affairs (IPA) had been nominated for the award for their work in bringing down Australia’s carbon price.

Crikey captured the misleading wording of the nomination for posterity before the Atlas Network became more cautious and took it – as well as its list of partners – down: “As the only major organization in Australia to publicly and consistently oppose the tax, the IPA’s work against the carbon tax was instrumental in fostering sentiment against the tax, which, in addition to its economic drawbacks, wouldn’t have achieved any environmental goals.”

The Atlas Network is the organising force that connects “almost 600 think tanks in over 100 countries” to promote big business’s goals. While the head office is not currently funded by fossil fuel, many of the partner organisations continue to be, and fighting climate change science and solutions remain core business for many of them.

In fact, a carbon price was working and has been found to be an effective method of pushing transition. Peta Credlin has admitted that the attacks on it as a “tax” were just “brutal retail politics.” The “fostering sentiment” that the Atlas Network described is the job of these so-called thinktanks. They create the permission structure for the policy that big business wants. They also enable the election of big business’s preferred political party.

Atlas’s wording highlighted that the IPA was the “only major organization in Australia” helping engineer Tony Abbott’s victory in 2013 and the resulting instant dismantling of the carbon price.

Voters need to be reminded that it is largely foreign mining interests that benefit from fostered sentiment created by thinktanks. Prizes worth $100,000 from abroad don’t often come for purely domestic campaigns. That said, one of the Atlas Network’s US partners awarded Gina Rinehart its “Lifetime Achievement Award” for her contribution to the Network’s shared goals in 2024.

Rinehart is the only known big donor to Wilson’s former employer, the IPA now. Her largesse was made public by accident: donations of over $2 million a year for two years were recorded in tax filings submitted to court. We cannot know how much more she has given. Rupert Murdoch continues to support this organisation his father co-founded in 1943. We cannot know if he gives money now, but News Corp is an “in kind” donor, providing constant platforms for the Australian Atlas partners and interlinked groups.

The IPA is 80 years old, so it seems more respectable than the temporary dark money front groups that are popping up to push messaging as suspect as the IPA’s war on the carbon “tax.” The difference is more in scale and ambition than in nature.

These bodies copy the Atlas Network model: that involves spawning new PR operations to ensure that the electorate does not come between the corporations and their profits. Because the Atlas Network no longer declares which organisations it lists as partners (and many interlinked bodies were never listed at all), we cannot declare them to be part of the Network. They serve, however, the same purpose for similar clients.

Australians for Prosperity is clearly interlinked with both the coal sector (by the only declared donation), and the Liberal Party (by its personnel). It was forced to delete two months-worth of social media posts by the Australian Electoral Commission for being unauthorised election material. Their prime targets are the independent MPs that are now representing formerly Liberal Party safe seats, and they are spreading disinformation to discredit these parliamentarians.

It may be a coincidence that the body has copied the name of one of the Atlas partners most responsible for the current debased condition of American politics, Americans for Prosperity.

Advance’s links to Australia’s Atlas Network partners were laid out by Dr Jeremy Walker in the Voice campaign. Its origin and links to the Liberal Party as well as the global thinktank operation was explored in detail in the Sydney Morning Herald. That report also illustrates the body’s links to Zionist operations, fostered through its co-founder David Adler. It has three new front groups to discredit the Greens: Greens Truth, Her Truth and Election News.

There are as many as 18 such shadowy organisations acting against renewables and in favour of nuclear energy at the moment. Most can be found on social media targeting key seats. Others can afford billboards.

Pollsters have always been a key tool in business propaganda: the Coalition’s internal pollster in this election campaign is connected to Australians for Natural Gas. That body’s director, Nathanial Smith” is also the Liberal Party’s candidate for Whitlam.

One of the old guard Atlas partners is the Australian Taxpayers’ Alliance. Its founder, Tim Andrews, is now working for Grover Norquist at Atlas’s Americans for Tax Reform in DC. The current executive director is Brian Marlow.

Marlow is also functioning as the “Campaigner” for Citizen Go, under whose umbrella he appeared before federal Parliament arguing against the Misinformation and Disinformation Bill. Citizen Go is a global project constructed out of a Spanish extremist Catholic “hate group.” Citizen Go’s Australian “campaigns director” is George Christensen who has registered himself as the head of a “foreign political organisation.” The Facebook page campaigns using an “end abortion” hashtag, using misleading information. As a state MP, Nathaniel Smith argued for abortion to “remain in the Crimes Act.” The Coalition candidates’ commitment to a Christian Nationalist position is not separate from their Atlas Network links but directly connected to that movements’ transnational trend.

It is not surprising, in either of Marlow’s roles, to find such figures fighting efforts to control mis- and disinformation. With climate science as certain as it is, and the need to transition to clean sources of energy so urgent, the campaign to disrupt the transition is hard pressed to find useful truths: both misleading information and distraction can serve.

Australia needs a minority government with the crossbench granting it courage to tackle the threats to Australian politics of dark money and shadowy disinformation campaigns.

Political merchandise

We don’t need a government containing Tim Wilson whose speech at the 2015 Atlas Network regional gathering, the Friedman Conference, celebrated his turning Human Rights Commissioner role into a defence of property rights. Think hard about why this network values protecting property but not protecting you as a community member, worker, consumer or citizen.

May 10, 2025 Posted by Christina Macpherson | secrets and lies | Leave a comment

The pro-nuclear drive and Zionism are inter-twined

https://theaimn.net/the-pro-nuclear-drive-and-zionism-are-inter-twined/ 10 May 25

For many years, I’ve been running websites devoted to the nuclear-free movement. People have asked me why, over the past two years, I’ve been including news about Israel and Gaza.

What on earth do Israel and Gaza have to do with the pro-nuclear cause?

Well, unfortunately, quite a lot.

Here’s a report from 2015 –

“While everyone believes that the Israelis possess a sizable nuclear arsenal, no one really knows how big that arsenal is.  In 2008, President Jimmy Carter estimated that Israel probably had a minimum of 150 weapons in stock ready to use if the most dire circumstances warrant.  Six years later, the former President revised that estimate and put the figure in the 300 range, which—based on Carter’s calculations—would mean that Israel doubled its arsenal from the 2008-2014 time-period. “

Of course the Israeli government “does not confirm or deny” that they’ve got nuclear weapons, and the cowardly governments that support Israel similarly do not officially confirm it. And of course Israel has not signed the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons (NPT), or participated in any kind of weapons control negotiations.

In Sep 22, 2023 Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu warned Iran at the United Nations of a “nuclear threat” in what his office quickly walked back as a slip of the tongue. In July 2024  Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu pledged in a scathing speech to Congress on Wednesday to achieve “total victory” against Hamas.

The Zionist philosophy means that the Jews are God’s chosen people. And the Islamics certainly are not. The attitude of Israel towards the Palestinians is that they are not the same kind of human being as the Jews are. Indeed, it’s OK to starve Gazan children to death – after all, they are some kind of untermenchen.

Well, the genocide of Gazans is being achieved without any need for nuclear weapons. But what about the other Islamics? There’s Yemen, and there’s Iran. Netanyahu believes that Iran poses an existential threat to the Zionist state, and could make a nuclear weapon in a short period of time, making Israel and even the US unable to defeat or contain it.

To what lengths might Netanyahu go, to prevent that? Bomb Iran’s nuclear sites?

And would Donald Trump, an enthusiastic fan of Israel, support that option.

Here’s Trump, seven months ago, urging Israel to make such a strike,

While I’ve been thinking about this for some time, I was prompted to write about it now, after reading an article by Lucy Hamilton in Australian Independent Media, about the close involvement of Australian pro-nuclear front groups with the Zionist movement.

It’s not only Israel that we must worry about, in Australia, and presumably world-wide. If we aim to be nuclear-free, we are up against a lobby determined to have nuclear-weapons superiority, and the Zionist movement is right up there in that determination.

May 10, 2025 Posted by Christina Macpherson | secrets and lies | Leave a comment

Australia Islamic Caliphate? Dark money and the 11th hour Election propaganda blitzkrieg

by Wendy Bacon and Yaakov Aharon | May 2, 2025, https://michaelwest.com.au/australia-islamic-caliphate-dark-money-and-the-11th-hour-election-propaganda-blitzkrieg/
An 11th-hour Election 2025 blitzkrieg claims the Greens are enabling extremists who “will do anything in their power to establish a worldwide Islamic Caliphate.” Wendy Bacon and Yaakov Aharon investigate the Dark Money election.

Minority Impact Coalition is a shadowy organisation that appeared on Australia’s political landscape in February of this year.

According to its constitution, its object is to promote “mutual respect and tolerance between groups of people in Australia by actively countering racism and bringing widespread understanding and tolerance amongst all sectors of the community.”

However, it is spreading ignorance, fear and Islamophobia to millions of mostly male Australians living in the outer suburbs and the regions.  

Advance is “transparent … easy to deal with”

Australian Jewish Association webinar, Roslyn Mendelle, who is of Israeli-American origin and a director of Minority Impact Coalition (MIC), said Advance introduced her to the concept of a third party.
“Advance has been nothing but absolutely honest, transparent, direct, and easy to deal with”, Mendelle said.

The electoral laws, which many say are “broken by design”, mean that it will be several months before MIC’s major donors are revealed. Donors making repeated donations below $15,900 are unlisted ‘dark money’. (This threshold will change to $5000 in 2026).

Coming in second place are the returns from the Australian Taxation Office.

Further down is a $50,000 donation from Henroth Pty Ltd, co-owned by brothers Stanley and John Roth. Stanley is also a director of the $51 million charity United Israel Appeal, while John Roth is married to Australia’s Special Envoy for Combating Antisemitism, Jillian Segal.

$14.5 million of Advance’s funds is unlisted dark money.

In NSW, it is targeting Greens candidates everywhere and is also focused on the Labor-held seat of Gilmore, challenged by Liberal Party candidate Andrew Constance.

Roslyn (nee Wolberger) and her wife Hava Mendelle founded MIC last year. The couple met in 2017 while Roslyn was living in the Israeli settlement of Talpiot in Occupied East Jerusalem in breach of international law.

Independent journalist Alex McKinnon reported that MIC spokesperson and midwife, Sharon Stoliar, wrote in an open letter:

“When you chant ‘from the river to the sea Palestine will be free’… while wearing NSW Health uniforms, you are representing NSW Health in a call for genocide of Jews.YOU. ARE. SUPPORTING. TERRORISM… I. WILL. REPORT. YOU.”

Its campaign material is authorised by Joshu Turier, a retired boxer and right-wing extremist.

According to Facebook library, MIC’s ads are targeted at men, particularly between ages 35 and 54 in Queensland, Victoria and New South Wales.  

In mid-April, the group paid for an ad so extreme that Instagram pulled it, leading to Turier reposting on his own Facebook page again this week. He complained that “It’s beyond troubling when our media platforms remove simple, factual material.”

They are “coming for us” {Editor … oh no!} 

By Wednesday, the video was back on MIC’s Facebook account. The video says that the Greens are deliberately enabling pro-Palestine student protesters, who

“Don’t actually believe in the concept of a nation. They don’t believe in borders. They don’t believe there is a national identity. They believe in the Islamic brotherhood.”

“…It is just the beginning. When antisemitism starts, it’s not going to stop. They are going to come for Christians, for Atheists, for Agnostics.”

MIC is spending big on billboards, campaign trucks, and professional videos targeting at least five electorates. But despite their big spending, they cannot be found on the Australian Electoral Commission transparency register.

According to the transparency advocacy group WhoTargets.Me, MIC has spent more than $50,000 on Google and Meta ads in the last month alone. This doesn’t account for billboards, trucks, labour, or the 200,000 addresses letterboxed in late March.

More investigation shows their donations will all flow through the QJ Collective Ltd (QJC), which also ‘powers’ the Minority Impact Coalition website. QJC is registered as a significant third party with the Australian Electoral Commission.

Clones with ghost offices

MIC and Queensland Jewish Collective are virtually identical. They have always had the same directors, with Azin Naghibi replacing Roslyn’s partner, Hava Mendelle, as both QJC and MIC director in March 2025.

When QJC first came to MWM’s notice last year, it was running a relatively well-funded campaign, although limited to several seats, to ‘Put the Greens Last’ in the Queensland state election.

In September 2024, the group’s website stated that it was “non-partisan and not left or right-wing”, and that its “goal was to support Queenslanders in making informed decisions when voting for our leaders”. MIC is the vehicle for this campaign.

Today, neither the QJC nor MIC makes any such claim. The Collective’s website lists its leading ‘campaign’ as “exposing the two-faced nature of the Labor party”.

The alarming detail

While the two ‘grassroots’ groups share several of their total five different associated addresses, mostly consisting of shared offices, it is not a perfect match.

For both groups, directors Mendelle and Turier list their address as 470 St Pauls Terrace, Fortitude Valley, Queensland. There was no name or company, just an address; however, shared offices run by Jubilee Place are available at that location. 

QJC and MIC director Naghibi lists her address on both extracts as 740 St Pauls Terrace, a non-commercial building.

Either Mendelle and Turier are living out of a shared office, or Naghibi is unable to remember the address of the shared office she has little real connection to.

Last year, MWM contacted the owners of QJC’s listed office address at Insolvency Company Accountants in Tewantin, Queensland. At first, the firm said that no one had heard of them. Following that, the firm said that the Collective is a client of the firm, however denied any further connection.

A fresh search this year showed an additional contact address listed by the grassroots Collective – this time 1700 kilometres away – at 1250 Malvern Road, Malvern, Victoria. Again, there was no name or company, just an address.

Located at that address is boutique accounting firm Greenberg & Co, which specialises in serving clients who are “high net worth individuals”. MWM contacted senior partner Jay Greenberg, who said his role was only one of ‘financial compliance’. He said that he did have personal views on the election, but these were not relevant. He declined to discuss further details.

Previously, Greenberg served as Treasurer (2018-2019), under Jillian Segal as President, of the peak roof body, the Executive Council of Australian Jewry.

Attack of the clones

Better Australia is a third-party campaigner that, like QJ Collective in 2024, claims to be bipartisan.

Its communications are authorised by Sophie Calland, an active member of NSW Labor’s Alexandria Branch. Her husband, Ofir Birenbaum – from the nearby Rosebery Branch – is also a member of the third party Better Australia.

Co-convenor of Labor Friends of Israel, Eric Roozendaal, and former Prime Minister Scott Morrison’s secretary, Yaron Finkelstein, provided further campaign advice at a members’ meeting.

Patron of Labor Friends of Israel and former Senator Nova Peris teamed up with Better Australia for a campaign video last week. 

“When Greens leader Adam Bandt refuses to stand in front of the Australian flag,” Peris said, “I ask, how can you possibly stand for our country?”

Better Australia’s stated goal is to campaign for a major government, regardless of which major party is in office.

The group urges voters to “put the Greens and Teals last”, warning that a Labor minority government would be chaos. The ‘non-partisan’ third party has made no statements on the Liberal-National Coalition, nor on a minority government with One Nation.

Some Better Australia workers – who wear bright yellow jackets labelled ‘community advisor’ – are paid, and others volunteer.

‘Isabella’ told MWM that her enlistment as a volunteer for the third-party campaigner is “not political” – rather, it is all “about Israel”.

Previously, Isabella had protested in support of the Israeli hostages and prisoners of war held in Gaza.

Better Australia’s ‘community advisor’ Isabella at a Bondi Junction polling booth. Source: Wendy Bacon, supplied

Another campaigner told us he was paid by Better Australia. He spoke little English and declined to say more.

Two schoolgirls campaigning at Rose Bay told MWM they were paid by their father, who had chaired a Better Australia meeting the previous evening. They declined to disclose his name.

On Wednesday, the group posted a video of Calland campaigning at Wentworth’s Kings Cross booth, which included an image of her talking with a young Better Australia worker.

MWM later interviewed this woman, who is an Israeli on a working holiday visa. She was supporting the campaign because it fits her political “vision”: the Greens and independent MPs like Allegra Spender must be removed from office because they are “against Israel” and for a “Free Palestine” which would mean the end of “my country”.

Allegra Spender denies these assertions.

Greens leader Adam Bandt remained determinedly optimistic, telling MWM that organisations such as Better Australia and MIC,

“are able to run their disinformation campaigns because Australia has no truth in political advertising laws, which enables them to lie about the priorities of the Greens and crossbench without consequence, as well as huge corporate money flowing into politics.”

“In this term of Parliament, Labor failed to progress truth in political advertising laws, and instead did a dirty deal with the Liberals on electoral reforms to try and shut out third parties and independents.”

Labor’s candidate for Wentworth, Savannah Peake, told MWM on Tuesday that she has known Calland for 18 months.

Peake said that while she knew Calland had previously founded Better Council, she had only discovered Calland was authorising Better Australia when she arrived at the booth that morning.

Peake told MWM that she had contacted the NSW Labor Head Office to voice her objections and was confident the issue would be “dealt with swiftly”.

The third-party campaign runs contrary to Peake’s preferences, which tells supporters in Wentworth to vote #1 Labor and #2 Allegra Spender. MWM repeatedly tried to follow up with Peake throughout the week to find out what action NSW Labor had taken, but received no reply.

Liberal candidate for Wentworth, Ro Knox, complies with Better Australia’s call to put Greens last on her voting preferences. 

Many people in NSW Labor know about their fellow members’ involvement in Better Australia. The Minister for Environment and MP for Sydney, Tanya Plibersek, state member Ron Hoenig and NSW Labor have all previously refused to answer questions.

A Labor volunteer at a Wentworth pre-poll booth told MWM that he disapproved if a fellow party member was involved with the third party. Two older Labor volunteers were in disbelief, having incorrectly assumed that the anti-Teal posters were authorised by the Trumpet of Patriots party. Another said he was aware of Calland’s activities but had decided ‘not to investigate’ further.

Better Australia focuses on Richmond

By the end of the week, Better Australia had left a trail of “Put the Greens last’ placards across Sydney’s Inner West, one of them outside the Cairo Takeaway cafe where the third party’s organiser, Ofir Birenbaum, was first exposed.

The third party have extended their polling campaign to the seat of Richmond, on the North coast of NSW where campaign sources are expecting more volunteers on election day.  

As parties dash to the finishing line, they are calling for more donations to counter the astroturfers. According to website TheyTargetYou, the major parties alone have spent $11.5 million on Meta and Google ads over the last month. 

Better Australia splurged $200,000 on ads targeting digital TV, social media, and the Australian Financial Review. Digital ads will continue in the final three days of the election, exploiting loopholes in the mandated political advertising blackout. 

The Australian public has made little progress towards transparency in the current term of government.

Until reforms are made, Silicon Valley tech giants will continue to profit from dodgy ads and astroturfing groups sowing division with each Australian election cycle.

May 4, 2025 Posted by Christina Macpherson | secrets and lies | Leave a comment

Australian Government ignores AUKUS ‘very high risk’ warning from the Admiral in charge

Admiral Mead sought to bell the cat while Defence Minister Marles has not been straight with the Australian people about the very high risks of AUKUS, even though he has been briefed on and appears to have informed Cabinet of those risks.

Marles should front up about this concealment without delay.

Labor not blameless

by Rex Patrick | Apr 29, 2025, https://michaelwest.com.au/government-ignores-aukus-high-risk-warning-from-the-admiral-in-charge/

The AUKUS submarine project faces huge risks, and Cabinet knows. But as the Government ships $2B of taxpayers’ money to the US this year, with much more to follow, the taxpayer is not being told. Rex Patrick reports.

On 26 February this year, Vice Admiral Jonathan Mead, the man in charge of AUKUS, advised the Senate that the AUKUS submarine program was “very high risk”. He said, “We’ve made that clear to government, and the government has made that clear to the public.”

However, it has not.

I follow AUKUS closely and had not heard that publicly before. Whilst it is absolutely the case, and something MWM has reported on extensively, this was the first public admission of the very high risk nature of the project from the Australian Submarine Agency.

Concerns about US submarine production rates and the weakness of the UK’s submarine industrial base have generated grave doubts about whether the $368B AUKUS scheme will deliver nuclear-powered submarines for Australia.

Moreover, former Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull has revealed, after conversations with insiders, that there is no Plan B.

“Plan B is that we will not get any submarines.”

FOI ahoy

I was somewhat surprised by Admiral Mead’s unusual candour, so on 27 February, I moved to test the veracity of his remarks with an FOI application directed at the Australian Submarine Agency (ASA) seeking access to “any ministerial submission or briefing provided by ASA to the Minister for Defence … that refers to the AUKUS nuclear submarine program as involving ‘high risk’ or ‘very high risk’.”

I also sought access to ‘any statement made by the Minister for Defence or the Minister for Defence Industry and Capability Delivery that refers to the AUKUS nuclear submarine program as involving ‘high risk’ or ‘very high risk’.”

A decision on those was made this week. FOI applications can reveal the truth by what is disclosed, by what is withheld, and by confirming what doesn’t exist.

ASA confirmed the existence of a ministerial briefing characterising the AUKUS submarine program as involving ‘high risk’ or ‘very high risk’, but refused access to that briefing on national security and Cabinet secrecy grounds. Significantly, ASA’s refusal decision confirmed this document was produced for the dominant purpose of briefing a Minister on an attached Cabinet submission.

In effect, the Submarine Agency confirmed Admiral Mead’s statement that ASA has briefed the government on the ‘high risk’ or ‘very high risk’ nature of the AUKUS project, and that briefing was submitted to the Defence Minister for Cabinet consideration.

“That high-risk assessment has gone to the very top of the Government.”

Alarm bells should be ringing.

Misleading the public

But the FOI decision also reveals that Defence Minister Richard Marles has not been forthcoming with the Australian public about the full hazards of AUKUS.

In relation to statements the minister has made to the public on the risk status of the project, the Australian Submarine Agency advised that ‘no in scope documents were identified’ that show the Defence Minister has made any public statement that acknowledges the ‘high’ or ‘very high’ risk of the AUKUS scheme.

The agency was able to find only a handful of statements referring to risk management in general and assertions that the United Kingdom will carry the primary risks of the AUKUS-SSN construction.

Admiral Mead was not correct in his statement to the Senate, but more importantly, the Government has been caught red-handed fudging the risks associated with the AUKUS scheme. The public has been misled.

Admiral Mead sought to bell the cat while Defence Minister Marles has not been straight with the Australian people about the very high risks of AUKUS, even though he has been briefed on and appears to have informed Cabinet of those risks.

Marles should front up about this concealment without delay.

Labor not blameless

Last week, at a pre-polling booth, I was standing next to a Labor volunteer who was handing out how-to-vote cards for the seat of Adelaide. An elderly gentleman stuck out his hand and asked the volunteer for a how-to-vote card.

“We have to stop the Liberals getting in”, he said. “We don’t need nuclear power”.

I couldn’t resist. “But you’re taking a Labor how-to-vote”, I said. He gave me a strange look. “What about the eight naval reactors?” I queried. “A naval reactor is a reactor, and naval nuclear waste is nuclear waste”.

Many in the Labor camp think AUKUS is Morrison’s (and Peter Dutton’s) baby. But for Labor, that’s just a convenient mistruth. In September 2021, Morrison announced AUKUS. But he only announced a study. It was Prime Minister Anthony Albanese at the March 2023 San Diego “kabuki show” (as described by Paul Keating) that turned it into a formal Defence project behemoth with a projected cost of $368 billion.

Pre-polling booths are a good place to hang out for political gossip. I also held a discussion with a long-standing grassroots Labor Party member who proceeded to tell me how he had been sidelined for his opposition to AUKUS.

There’s no doubt the Labor rank-and-file have been cut out of the party’s decision-making with the Labor leadership ramming an AUKUS endorsement through the party’s 2023 national conference. Since then, the dissenting views of many, perhaps even a majority of Labor members, have been marginalised and suppressed.

AUKUS to be torpedoed

Politics aside, any project manager worth their salt would put an end to AUKUS. It’s a looming procurement shipwreck.

The US will not be able to supply the Virginia Class submarines to the Royal Australian Navy. The US Congressional Research Service has calculated a US build rate of 2.3 boats per annum is necessary to enable the US to provide boats to Australia without harming US undersea warfare capability. The current build rate is somewhere between 1.1 and 1.3 boats per annum.

The British submarine industry is one big cluster fiasco. Fruit that will flow from that program will be late, possibly rotten, and far more expensive than planned.

Meeting delivery obligations by the US and UK under the program will be really hard. And the fact that the Australian Government can’t even be up front and honest about the program

“suggests there is no chance of success.”

But Albanese need not worry, nor Marles. By the time all of this sinks in, they’ll be out of the system. It will be our children who suffer from the tens of billions wasted and the massive hole in our national security capability.

Rex Patrick

Rex Patrick is a former Senator for South Australia and earlier a submariner in the armed forces. Best known as an anti-corruption and transparency crusader, Rex is running for the Senate on the Lambie Network ticket next year – www.transparencywarrior.com.au.

May 1, 2025 Posted by Christina Macpherson | secrets and lies | Leave a comment

Peter Dutton’s claim about SA premier’s nuclear support misleads

Matthew Elmas, April 18, 2025, https://www.aap.com.au/factcheck/peter-duttons-claim-about-sa-premiers-nuclear-support-misleads/?fbclid=IwY2xjawJyJ2NleHRuA2FlbQIxMQABHumaAudgFry-WUdbHh6CG_Yc1zFFAjZ_IBuzZE5XtEC3LYX3IqI3WdN7jBwq_aem_0I9My22omArVRsJyCKUhyg

WHAT WAS CLAIMED

South Australian Premier Peter Malinauskas supports nuclear power.

OUR VERDICT

Misleading. While Mr Malinauskas supports nuclear power globally, he’s repeatedly opposed nuclear power in Australia due to the costs.

AAP FactCheck – Peter Dutton is misleadingly claiming South Australian Premier Peter Malinauskas has been “very clear” in his support for nuclear power.

While Mr Malinauskas has spoken of the need for nuclear as part of the global energy mix, he has repeatedly opposed nuclear power in Australia due to high costs.

Mr Dutton made the misleading claim during the leaders’ debate hosted by the ABC on April 16, in response to questions about getting states and territories on board with his nuclear plan.

The coalition will need to overturn state and territory bans on nuclear for its policy, but faces opposition from governments, including from the Liberal Nationals in Queensland.

“We can work with state governments,” Mr Dutton said (timestamp 28 minutes 33 seconds).

“The South Australian Premier has been very clear of his support for nuclear.”

Mr Dutton has made the claim before, including during a press conference on April 8, 2025, where he suggested Mr Malinauskas has been upfront about his support for “the nuclear policy”.

AAP FactCheck asked Mr Dutton for evidence to support his claims but did not receive a response.

After the coalition unveiled plans in 2024 to construct a nuclear power plant in South Australia, Mr Malinauskas held a press conference to outline his position on the policy.

He said his position on nuclear power has been consistent for more than a decade.

“Nuclear power has an important role to play in the global energy mix as we pursue a decarbonised future – that’s just an obvious truth,” Mr Malinauskas said (0:45).

“As a premier I am fine with nuclear power, as long as it doesn’t make electricity bills more expensive,” Mr Malinauskas went on to say.

“What we know from report after report is that in the Australian context, it will make power more expensive, so why on earth would we pursue it?

“I would support nuclear power if it didn’t make electricity more expensive. But it will make it more expensive… all the evidence says it will make electricity a lot more expensive.”

Mr Malinauskas reiterated his position more recently on April 1, 2025, The Guardian reported.

“Why would any premier of any jurisdiction around the country support a plan to make electricity more expensive in households, in business?” he said.

“Peter Dutton has a plan to make it more expensive. I can’t be clearer about it.

“His plan would make electricity and energy prices for South Australia more expensive and there is not a month of Sundays we would support a plan to do that.”

AAP FactCheck is an accredited member of the International Fact-Checking Network. To keep up with our latest fact checks, follow us on Facebook, Instagram, Threads, X, BlueSky, TikTok and YouTube.

April 27, 2025 Posted by Christina Macpherson | secrets and lies | Leave a comment

On Bullsh*t -The West Report

April 21, 2025 Posted by Christina Macpherson | secrets and lies | Leave a comment

Secret AUKUS nuclear waste site docs in Cabinet lockdown

come May 3, if Peter Dutton gets elected, this work will not be available to the Australian Submarine Agency or other Government Departments. At that point the review will be locked away at the National Archives of Australia, unavailable until at least 2044.

The Federal Government has successfully managed to bury, for twenty years, a report into how high-level AUKUS nuclear waste will be stored, and where. Transparency warrior Rex Patrick reports.

Michael West Media, Rex Patrick reports.

”by Rex Patrick | Mar 31, 2025 |

The circumstances of this case are extraordinary, as is the outcome. A report of very high public interest has effectively been hidden from view by the bureaucracy’s misrepresentation of the report’s nature and origin.

In early 2023, the Cabinet made some sort of direction for the Department of Defence to look into AUKUS’ high-level nuclear waste storage.

Ms Alexandra Kelton, a then Defence Department official and now Acting Deputy Director-General of Program and Policy in the Australian Submarine Agency (ASA) contracted a commercial company, SG Advice, to prepare a report.

This is despite the Cabinet Handbook expressly prohibiting external contractors from seeing or handling Cabinet documents.

The Cabinet Handbook states, “It is inappropriate to provide copies of, or access to, final or draft Cabinet documents to sources external to government.”

There was no evidence that a direction was made to produce a report for Cabinet. The February 2023 letter of engagement explains that the role of SG Advice would be advisory in nature and that any decision related to the storage and disposal of radioactive waste is “a decision for the Australian Government.”

Ms Kelton later deposed that the words “Australian Government” mean “Cabinet”. Administrative Review Tribunal (ART) Deputy President, Peter Britten-Jones, swallowed that.

Insecure and unsecured

Consistent with a document that is not a Cabinet document, the nuclear waste review was prepared on unclassified computers and transferred on unclassified networks across multiple agencies.

The Cabinet Handbook, which sets out Cabinet rules and is signed by the Prime Minister and Attorney General, states that in preparing Cabinet documents, such documents must be prepared on a separate secure Cabinet System called CabNet.It further states that Cabinet Division manages and maintains the CabNet+ system, which is the real-time, secure, whole of Australian government information and communications technology system used to support the Commonwealth’s end-to-end Cabinet process.

The system provides electronic access at the PROTECTED and SECRET security classifications from approved networks across government.

It is likely that Ms Kelton and perhaps others engaged in breaches of security by not enforcing this rule. Lawyers for the Australian Submarine Agency suggested that Ms Kelton’s statement, “as a matter of practicality for communicating and formatting parts of the draft, that process occurred outside the CabNet system,

“should be given more weight than the rules set by the Prime Minister and Attorney-General.”

RoboDebt conduct, eat your heart out. Britten-Jones referred to these as “irregularities”, and then just moved on.

Bad decisions by ART – the Administrative Review Tribunal 

………As things now stand, any mid-ranking bureaucrat can unilaterally declare that a report was intended for Cabinet and Cabinet secrecy will apply, shrouding failures, scandals and politically awkward problems from public scrutiny for decades.……………

This latest decision is a bad one, too. It’s a very bad decision.

………………………..High public interest

When the nuclear waste review was completed in November 2023 and sent to Defence Minister Richard Marles with a bureaucratic proposal, the review was included as an attachment to a submission to the National Security Committee (NSC) of the Cabinet.

In the brief that recommended it be attached to an NSC submission Admiral Jonathon Mead warned Marles that the report would be of high public interest. The bureaucrats in the Australian Submarine Agency were clearly worried about public reactions if the review were ever released, so they belatedly wanted it shrouded in Cabinet secrecy……………………………………………………………

A waste of money

The contract for SG Advice to produce the report was $360,000. Four Agencies were involved in compiling the report: ANSTO, ARWA, Geoscience Australia, and the Australian Submarine Agency. The work was conducted over nine months. This document is a million-dollar document.

The nuclear waste review was described by Ms Kelton as a “significant piece of policy advice and [t]he subject matter for the Review report remains current and relevant to forward Government decision-making.”

Legally, at least for now, the report is a Cabinet document.

But the Cabinet Handbook states Cabinet documents are considered to be the property of the Government of the day. They are not departmental records. As such they must be held separately from other working documents of government administration.

That means, come May 3, if Peter Dutton gets elected, this work will not be available to the Australian Submarine Agency or other Government Departments. At that point the review will be locked away at the National Archives of Australia, unavailable until at least 2044.

So as soon as the Government changes, sooner or later, it will be a case of “start again”.

Who in their right mind would nominate that a significant piece of work should be a cabinet document? It’s a costly move. But then again, the Australian Submarine Agency did decide to give the United States $4.7B to upgrade their shipyards with no clawback if those same shipyards don’t ever deliver us a submarine. Before that, the Defence Department spent $4B not buying French submarines.

It’s stuff you wouldn’t normally read about, except here at MWM.

An appeal of the decision to the Federal Court is being considered. https://michaelwest.com.au/secret-aukus-nuclear-waste-site-docs-in-cabinet-lockdown/

March 31, 2025 Posted by Christina Macpherson | secrets and lies | Leave a comment

Integrity watchdog boss steps aside from six defence investigations

ABC News by political reporter Olivia Caisley, Sun 23 March 25

In short:

The National Anti-Corruption Commission has confirmed its chief Paul Brereton has recused himself from six defence matters referred to the watchdog and assigned those matters to a deputy commissioner.

Integrity experts are concerned about how Mr Brereton is handling potential conflict of interest issues related to defence.

What’s next?

The integrity watchdog will appear before a Senate committee on Thursday.

The head of the National Anti-Corruption Commission continues to hold senior roles in the Army Reserves, raising fresh questions about perceptions of neutrality as the watchdog probes a $45 billion federal defence contract. 

Six months after a unintentional misconduct finding was made against Paul Brereton over a robodebt referral, the NACC has confirmed the commissioner is self-managing potential conflict of interest issues if and when they arise.

When contacted by the ABC the NACC did not detail whether Mr Brereton had stepped away from a referral regarding the navy’s $45b Hunter frigate project, but confirmed he had recused himself from six defence matters to avoid any perceptions of bias.

Federal crossbenchers — including Greens senator David Shoebridge and Independent MP Helen Haines — have flagged issues with the integrity body since its inception in July 2023 and are pushing for increased transparency in the next term of parliament…………………………………

A NACC spokesperson confirmed Mr Brereton has recused himself from six defence matters being investigated by the commission, but it’s unclear at what point in the process he stepped away.

“The commissioner has appropriately remained involved in decision making and deliberations where the matter does not involve the interests of an individual or unit with whom he has or has had a close association,” they said.

“… Where an actual or perceived conflict is declared or ruled, the member does not participate in the discussion and leaves the meeting while the matter is discussed and determined.”

But Greens senator David Shoebridge told the ABC Mr Brereton’s continued association with defence raised a red flag and the commissioner shouldexplain whether he’s recusing himself from early deliberations or just decision making.

“I think most people will just be shaking their heads at this” he said. 

Responding to questions about whether it’s appropriate for Mr Brereton to retain his position as Major General in the ADF Reserves, as well as honorary appointments as Colonel Commandant of the Royal New South Wales Regiment and the University of New South Wales Regiment, the NACC said it wasn’t concerned.

“The commissioner’s ongoing defence roles are honorary appointments and generally present no conflict of interest,” a spokesperson told the ABC.

Director of The Center for Public Integrity, Geoffrey Watson SC, described the NACC’s explanation as problematic.

“I haven’t got complete confidence in the commissioner’s ability to gauge conflict of interest — given his robodebt error,” he said. 

“The response seems to gloss over potential defence conflicts of interest because certain appointments of Mr Brereton’s are ceremonial or honorary. I would think if your commitment is so emotionally strong you’re willing to do it for free — it makes it worse not better.”

The August declaration provided to the Senate also lists nine current and former politicians with whom Mr Brereton has previously had professional contact.

Those names include — Defence Minister Richard Marles, former defence minister Linda Reynolds and Marise Payne, who was the defence minister at the time the frigate announcement was made.

The Guardian reported last year Mr Brereton’s Robodebt conflict related to his service in the army reserves.

Senator Shoebridge says he’s been waiting 18 months for a substantive response to his NACC referral regarding the Hunter frigates.

“I have not had any clarification about who is dealing with it, what stage it is at and I’m troubled commissioner Brereton might have had a role in it,” he said……………. https://www.abc.net.au/news/2025-03-23/integrity-watchdog-boss-steps-aside/105084982?utm_source=abc_news_app&utm_medium=content_shared&utm_campaign=abc_news_app&utm_content=twitter

March 24, 2025 Posted by Christina Macpherson | secrets and lies | Leave a comment

Burying The CIA’s Assange Secrets

The Dissenter, Kevin Gosztola, Feb 19, 2025

The CIA won the dismissal of a lawsuit brought by four Americans who claimed they had their privacy rights violated when they visited Julian Assange in Ecuador’s London embassy.

A United States judge dismissed a lawsuit pursued by four American attorneys and journalists, who alleged that the CIA and former CIA Director Mike Pompeo spied on them while they were visiting WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange in Ecuador’s London embassy. 

“The subject matter of this litigation,” Judge John Koeltl determined [PDF], “is subject to the state secrets privilege in its entirety.” Any answer to the allegations against the CIA would “reveal privileged information.” 

Few publications followed this case as closely as The Dissenter. It unfolded at the same time that the U.S. government pursued the extradition of Assange, making any outcome potentially significant. 

On August 15, 2022, Margaret Ratner Kunstler, a civil rights activist and human rights attorney, and Deborah Hrbek, a media lawyer, filed their complaint. Journalist Charles Glass and former Der Spiegel reporter John Goetz also joined them as plaintiffs. 

The lawsuit claimed that the plaintiffs, like all visitors, were required to “surrender” their electronic devices to employees of Undercover Global, a Spanish security company managed by David Morales that was hired by Ecuador to handle embassy security. They were unaware that UC Global had allegedly “copied the information stored on the devices” and shared the information with the CIA.

Pompeo allegedly approved the copying of visitors’ passports, “including pages with stamps and visas.” He ensured that all “computers, laptops, mobile phones, recording devices, and other electronics brought into the embassy,” were “seized, dismantled, imaged, photographed, and digitized.” This included the collection of IMEI and SIM codes from visitors’ phones.

Morales and UC Global were named as defendants in the lawsuit, however, due to the fact that they were not in the U.S., the claims against them were never really litigated. 

In December 2023, Koeltl dismissed multiple claims that were filed against the CIA. But remarkably, he found that the four Americans who had visited Assange had grounds to sue the CIA for violating their “reasonable expectation of privacy” under the Fourth Amendment of the U.S. Constitution.

“If the government’s search (of their conversations and electronic devices) and seizure (of the contents of their electronic devices) were unlawful, the plaintiffs have suffered a concrete and particularized injury fairly traceable to the challenged program and redressable by a favorable ruling,” Koeltl declared.

Soon after, the court was notified that the CIA would assert the state secrets privilege to block the lawsuit.

Bill Burns, who was the CIA director, submitted a declaration in April 2024 that asserted “serious” and “exceptionally grave” damage to the “national security” of the U.S. would occur if the case proceeded. 

……………………………………………… Burying secrets so deep and for so long that the public does not find them is typically the CIA’s objective when they invoke the state secrets privilege. They have buried a 6,300-page Senate intelligence report on CIA rendition, detention, and torture during the global war on terrorism. They are now burying their Assange secrets.

The decision all but ensures that the CIA will be able to conceal what they allegedly did to Assange, WikiLeaks, and his supporters for several decades. The agency, with support from the U.S. Justice Department, has already frustrated a Spanish court trying to prosecute Morales and other UC Global employees for alleged criminal acts.

It was always unlikely that Assange’s defense would uncover details about the CIA’s alleged actions and share those revelations during an Espionage Act trial. The restrictions the government and courts impose on defendants come with procedures to shield the CIA from scrutiny.

When the prosecution against Assange ended in a plea deal in June 2024, that benefited the CIA even if it was not the outcome that current and former high-ranking officials had desired. The CIA would never have to worry about the agency’s actions being discussed by the press and on social media during a high-profile trial. 

Of course, there is also the matter of the CIA allegedly violating the privacy rights of Assange visitors while the U.S government targeted a journalist living under political asylum in a foreign embassy. The U.S. news media never showed much interest in the CIA’s actions, however, let’s not forget there was widespread global opposition to the Assange prosecution that helped end the case. The agency is right to be concerned that if more was known it might erupt into an international scandal.  https://thedissenter.org/burying-the-cias-assange-secrets/

February 22, 2025 Posted by Christina Macpherson | secrets and lies | Leave a comment

Community consultation kicks off for submarine yard, but don’t mention nuclear

“South Australians should understand that AUKUS involves not only plans for the construction and sustainment of nuclear submarines at Osborne, but also for eventual decommissioning, storage and dismantling of those submarines on the banks of the Port Adelaide River, and indefinite storage of high-level nuclear waste, most likely in SA.”

 https://www.indailysa.com.au/news/in-depth/2025/02/19/community-consultation-kicks-off-for-submarine-yard-but-dont-mention-nuclear

The Australian Submarine Agency (ASA) will today start information sessions for community members about its planned nuclear submarine construction yard project, but any concerns about nuclear issues are out of scope.

The first of four information sessions for community members interested in the Australia Submarine Agency’s (ASA) planned nuclear submarine construction yard at Osborne begin today.

The first – at the State Library on North Terrace – comes during a period of public consultation through which the ASA is receiving feedback from community members on its draft ‘Strategic Impact Assessment Report’ for the yard.

Until 17 March members of the public can submit comments about the 203-page draft, which considers the plan’s potential impact on the environment but notably rules nuclear issues as “outside the scope” of the plan for a shipyard to build nuclear submarines.

It follows an agreement struck in November 2023 between the ASA and the Environment and Water Minister – Tanya Plibersek – which specifically precluded all nuclear issues from the scope of the environmental assessment process.

“The operation, sustainment and decommissioning of the submarines built at the Osborne SCY is considered out of scope of the Strategic Assessment and will be managed via separate environmental assessment processes and approvals as necessary,” the agreement reads.

“The manufacture, delivery and subsequent operation of the reactor power module is considered outside of the scope of the Strategic Assessment, however the assembly into the submarine is included.”

What is included is the processing of steel, outfitting of submarine sections, manufacture of pipe and electrical components, the use of supporting facilities (guard houses, car parks, warehousing, office accommodation, etc.) and more.

The resulting draft environmental impact report, plus 754 pages of appendices, asserts that the impacts of the construction yard are “likely to be acceptable”.

It also confirms on page 156 that “no nuclear actions” are included in the scope of the draft and that “other activities are considered outside the scope of the strategic assessment and will be managed via separate assessment processes and approvals as necessary”.

Former Senator and submariner Rex Patrick – who plans on running for a South Australian seat at the next Federal Election as a member of Jacqui Lambie’s political party – said the consultation process was designed to “minimise public engagement”.

“This is a ‘strategic assessment’ of a nuclear facility in which everything nuclear is excluded.  More attention is paid to the environmental impacts of car parks than nuclear reactors,” he told InDaily.

“South Australians should understand that AUKUS involves not only plans for the construction and sustainment of nuclear submarines at Osborne, but also for eventual decommissioning, storage and dismantling of those submarines on the banks of the Port Adelaide River, and indefinite storage of high-level nuclear waste, most likely in SA.”

He added that the fact that Port Adelaide is yet to be visited by a nuclear-powered vessel because it has never been approved as a suitable location for such visits made the situation “an extraordinary state of affairs”.

“Whatever one thinks about AUKUS, it’s clear the environmental assessment has been rigged from the beginning.

“It’s been rigged by ASA with the connivance of Minister Plibersek to produce a predetermined outcome, opening the way for further stages of the project to be ticked off by Defence bureaucrats as they wish.

Those decisions will have consequences for South Australia that will last decades, hundreds and indeed thousands of years.”

February 21, 2025 Posted by Christina Macpherson | secrets and lies | Leave a comment

The Atlas Network talking about itself

The MPS and its Atlas Network have conscientiously worked to change university campuses from places of free inquiry and critical thinking. Those beachheads in universities are matched by opportunities to find and promote “conservative” students. The idea is to shape them and potentially promote their careers in politics, the law, media, policy, academia and business.

January 26, 2025,  Lucy Hamilton ,  https://theaimn.net/the-atlas-network-talking-about-itself/

There is much to learn about the Atlas Network from one of Ron Manners’ Mannkal Economic Education Foundation newsletters. This Mannkal newsletter was issued in April 2015. The project continues unabated.

The Atlas Network is a global interconnection of over 500 faux “thinktanks” (or junktanks), dedicated to reinforcing and propagandising the “free market” message. The Mont Pelerin Society (MPS) is considered its steering committee. The Atlas Network was designed from 1981 to metastasise similar bodies to sell “business” ideas. It finds local enthusiasts and donors around the world to eliminate obstructions to profit for American corporations and local fellow-travellers. The MPS is secretive: its membership is only rarely leaked.Ron Manners, with mining money, founded Mannkal in 1997. He is currently a life member and on the board of the MPS. He was appointed to the Advisory Council for the Atlas Economic Research Foundation in 2010. In 2020, he was awarded Atlas’s Sir Antony Fisher Achievement award. The newsletter explains that the name Mannkal originated in the cable/telex address of the company he inherited.

The Mannkal newsletter illustrates the connection to the MPS which first met in 1947. It brought together Austrian School economists such as Friedrich von Hayek and Ludwig von Mises together with the Chicago School’s Milton Friedman. The MPS, through Hayek, began the process of creating plutocrat-serving law and economics institutes in universities around America.

It also took the model provided by bodies such as the Foundation for Economic Education (FEE), founded in 1946, to create the mirage that a chorus of genuine policy experts supported the political economy that the donors desired. Friedman did much of the public relations for the project before the junktanks became more organised.

In the 1950s, Brit Antony Fisher, inspired by The Road to Serfdom, visited Hayek for advice. One of the UK junktanks in the Network explains that Hayek “told him bluntly to forget politics. Politicians just follow prevailing opinions. If you want to change events, change ideas.” He instructed Fisher to found thinktanks to help shift the prevailing mood away from the consensus that government, labour and capital all had a say in how society should operate towards a world where capital could dictate all including directing the government for its own ends.

When the co-founder of the Atlas Network Heritage Foundation, Ed Feulner, visited Australia in 1985 to conduct a workshop, he contrasted Friedman’s role marketing supply side economics, privatisation and the flat tax with the need for bodies to “set the terms and agenda of public policy.” The intent was to propagandise or “market an idea.” There must be “permanent saturation campaigns with multi-pronged, longterm strategies.” Proctor and Gamble, he explained, sell Crest toothpaste by “keeping the product fresh in the consumers’ minds.” That was to be the junktanks’ role. (These are a combination of Dr Jeremy Walker’s summaries and Feulner’s own words. The essay is well worth your time to see the history and people of Atlas in Australia.)

That Adam Smith Institute essay continues to boast that the Atlas Network had grown at the time of writing to 450 bodies. Now, the essay boasts, “They are changing events all over the world – from land reform in Peru, through privatization in Britain, public debt control in Pakistan, to low-cost education in India. And spreading the ideas of liberty in even the most unlikely places, in the Muslim world from Morocco through Turkey to Yemen and Kazakhstan; in Africa from Mali and Ivory Coast to Ethiopia; in Europe and the Far East.”

The MPS and its Atlas Network have conscientiously worked to change university campuses from places of free inquiry and critical thinking. Those beachheads in universities are matched by opportunities to find and promote “conservative” students. The idea is to shape them and potentially promote their careers in politics, the law, media, policy, academia and business.

One of Mannkal’s primary roles is the selecting of libertarian students in Western Australia for scholarships to Atlas Network junktanks around the world. In this edition of the newsletter, two report back on attending an MPS conference. One celebrated attending “networking events with prominent intellectuals and businesspeople from around the world.” Another was dazzled by, “Having dinner alongside a mining magnate, the chairman of a prominent think-tank, a famous TV presenter and an ex-CIA agent”. He continued, “I was exposed to a network rich in knowledge and influence, including a plethora of world-class academics, Nobel laureates and senior political figures.” (Nafeez Ahmed’s Alt Reich shows the significance of the CIA – and their former Nazis – in the shaping of the Atlas Network.)

Melbourne’s Institute of Public Affairs (IPA), a 1943 creation, was absorbed into the Atlas Network in the era of the Liberal Party’s battle between the Wets and the Dries. It was reportedly “hijacked” by “radicals” after people senior in the body attended an MPS conference.

The newsletter report of a third scholarship holder illustrates the Cold War dread of communism that continues to motivate the MPS and its Atlas junktanks. Former Czech president Vaklav Klaus, then a member of the MPS for 25 years, spoke at a lunch. People who have suffered under communist and socialist governments are often rolled out to warn audiences of the continuing threat of authoritarianism. The offspring of refugees who have had awful experiences in such countries provide some of the enthusiastic recruits for Mannkal.

Neoliberalism was always a bunk economics that trumpeted itself as superior because it was driven by theory and rejected evidence. In fact it was an ideology – and a network of activists – that functioned to serve the rich donors. As the project became our new normal, it created ever more dramatic inequalities, resulting in the fury and pain that drives sadopopulism. Youthful interest in social democracies has been a more productive response. In 2024, the IPA was sharing American Atlas junktank Cold War 2.0 propaganda to address the risk that youth might turn away from the “freedom” they sell.

Those of us watching the Atlas Network’s Heritage Foundation plans come to fruition in the first week of Trump’s second term see where authoritarianism lurks right now. Heritage’s Mandate for Leadershiphas come a long way since its first iteration set out the Ronald Reagan economic revolution’s steps. Now it combines its ultra-libertarian positions with authoritarian social policy and autocratic governance.

In this newsletter, Mannkal boasts of 154 scholarships available. Many are to conferences. Fifteen are “midyear internships abroad.” Another 45 are “3-month internships abroad.” The students are sent to Atlas junktanks around the world with 12 partners in particular listed. They include the inspiration for Mannkal, the FEE in Atlanta mentioned above. The Institute of Economic Affairs in London is another. That’s the body that helped create Maggie Thatcher’s economics after she was inspired by The Road to Serfdom. She co-founded another Atlas junktank, the Centre for Policy Studies.

One of the interns celebrates Maggie Thatcher’s certainty of the importance of Atlas: “It started with Sir Keith and me, with the Centre for Policy Studies, and Lord Harris at the Institute of Economic Affairs. Yes, it started with ideas, with beliefs. That’s it. You must start with beliefs. Yes, always beliefs.” Thatcher and Reagan make repeat appearances as Atlas heroes in the newsletter.

Another intern went to the New Zealand Institute, where the Chief Economist is Eric Crampton, MPS director.

The intern who was sent to Atlas headquarters in Washington was delighted to attend events at several of the Atlas junktanks including the Cato Institute (where Rupert Murdoch was a board member in the 1990s) and the Leadership Institute (party to Project 2025 and, like Heritage, to the Christian Nationalist Council for National Policy). She was impressed by Tom Palmer: Atlas’s Executive Director for International Programs. His patronising speeches at the Friedman Conference over the years can be found online.

Another of the interns was deeply grateful to spend time in Melbourne at the IPA with John Roskam. Two went to the Menzies Research Centre (MRC). One was thrilled to sit in on “meetings with high-level politicians and policy-advisors.” Mathias Corman, then Finance Minister, spoke at an MRC event about “shrinking government” in New Zealand and Australia. The Atlas Network’s Project 2025 shows how brutal the cuts to government are ultimately intended to be.

The Executive Director of the Liberal Party-affiliated MRC Nick Cater has just spent the European summer with Viktor Orbán’s junktanks in Budapest.

Scholarship donors are listed in the newsletter as Manners, Gina Rinehart, Willy Packer and Toby Nichols.

One public figure who shows the path and now models the Atlas policy influence is David Seymour, Deputy Prime Minister of New Zealand/Aotearoa. He was recruited on his university campus by the Atlas Association of Consumers and Taxpayers (ACT). The ACT is the now the political party that he leads. Seymour was awarded an Atlas “MBA” after a fortnight’s training at Atlas headquarters. He went on to work in the Canadian Atlas Frontier Center before returning to Atlas work in NZ. He is far from the only political leader with deep Atlas Network ties.

Austrian School economics is largely dead these days, although Atlas partners continue to try to resuscitate them. One of the intern reports in the newsletter says the “highlight of my experience was learning about Austrian economics, a stream of economics that is not taught in Australian high schools or universities.” There is a cogent reason why she was freshly discovering the contribution from “economists such as Ludwig von Mises, Friedrich Hayek, Joseph Schumpeter and Frederic Bastiat – important economists whose ideas or names have never once been mentioned in my four years of studying economics.” Several interns mention this inculcation of Austrian School truthiness as part of their experience.

One of the most ebullient floggers of Austrian thought in America has been Rand Paul. The intern sent to Canada’s Fraser Institute was excited to report that he met the man.

The newsletter discusses its links to the then highlight of the Atlas Network calendar in Australasian region, the Friedman Conference. In 2024, the conference was reduced to a rabble-rousing event called the Triple Conference that gave a day to libertarianism, a day to Christian Nationalism and a day to conspiracy theory nonsense.

The Mannkal newsletter also links to the History of Economic Thought Society Australia (HETSA), which hosts a Young Scholars Initiative (YSI) conference. HETSA is, anecdotally, a host to MPS figures. In 2024, this event took place at the Alphacrucis University College in NSW. Alphacrucis is the official training college of the Pentecostal Assemblies of God network, Australian Christian Churches reshaped under Hillsong’s Brian Houston. Notre Dame University, also a Catholic force in reactionary politicking and culture wars, provided the YSI organiser.

A third conference series mentioned is the “Freedom to Choose” conference, hosted by Notre Dame University and “supported” by Mannkal. The 2024 conference focused as its theme on the “enduring relevance” of Hayek’s Road to Serfdom, the book that inspired so many of the big money donors in the early history of neoliberalism.

Ron Manners pontificates on Public Choice Theory in the newsletter. This is a core aspect of Atlas’s history.

One of the key details to be gleaned from the newsletter is that this project is lifelong and often intergenerational for the donors. One of the interns at the IEA considered herself lucky to meet Hayek’s daughter who allowed the interns to “gain insight into the workings of her father first-hand!” Antony Fisher’s daughter, Linda Whetstone, was president of the MPS, chair of the Atlas Network and on the board at the IEA. Rupert Murdoch’s father Keith co-founded the IPA with Charles Kemp. Rupert was an official board member at Cato, and an unofficial conduit of the IPA, Centre of Independent Studies and MRC, whose people are regularly found on his platforms. The Kemp sons, Rod and David, were key figures in the thinktanks and the Atlas Americanisation of Australian politics.

Charles Koch has been a prime force financially and strategically at Atlas for decades.

It is hard to know how much of the change from Keynesian balanced economy to neoliberal brutality is attributable to the MPS and the Atlas Network, compared to how much might be due to the general impact of the donors and ideologues. Industry lobbies and the direct power of the plutocrats intermix with the marketing of the Atlas Network and its soft power impact for American corporations around the world.

The plutocrats ventriloquised through Atlas operations, but do not seem to feel the same compulsion to separate their goals from their faces any longer. Whether it’s Elon Musk or Gina Rinehart, they seem to feel comfortable now dictating oligarch policy for themselves.

Regardless, it’s worth watching Atlas talking about itself: the freedom it declares it fights for was always anti-democratic.

January 26, 2025 Posted by Christina Macpherson | secrets and lies | Leave a comment

Destroyed Assange Files: Why Judge’s Rebuke Against Crown Prosecution Service Was So Significant.

“This is a significant victory in a long battle to get the truth out on the involvement of CPS in keeping Julian in arbitrary detention that later turned into political imprisonment, according to UN bodies and the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe.” 

An unknown number of emails were apparently deleted after one of the U.K.’s lead prosecutor in the case, Paul Close, retired from the CPS. The deletions occurred despite the fact that the case against the award-winning journalist and publisher of the news and transparency website WikiLeaks was still active.

the dissenter, Mohamed Elmaazi, 14 Jan 2025,

A British judge issued an unusually critical rebuke against the Crown Prosecution Service of England and Wales.

A British judge issued an unusually critical rebuke against the Crown Prosecution Service of England and Wales (CPS) for its handling of freedom of information requests related to Sweden’s failed attempt to extradite WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange.

The decision by the United Kingdom’s information rights tribunal was made public on January 10. It followed an appeal by Italian investigative journalist Stefania Maurizi, who argued that the CPS failed in its duty to properly explain why a senior prosecutor’s emails were allegedly deleted or destroyed.

In writing the decision for the three-member tribunal, First-Tier Tribunal (FTT) Judge Penrose Foss pierced the veil of deference that is often shown to governmental bodies in England and Wales by the U.K.’s data protection regulator, the Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO). Foss was quite blunt in her criticism of the CPS’s handling of multiple Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests that Maurizi had submitted as early as 2015. 

It is uncommon for the CPS to be a respondent in FOIA appeals. A review of FTT decisions regarding information rights cases since 2009 shows the CPS as a respondent in 16 out of 3,167 cases (0.5 percent). This includes two appeals filed by Maurizi. 

The decision establishes a precedent that may make it easier for future FOIA requests to be successful in the long run, according to Estelle Dehon KC of London’s Cornerstone Barristers, who represented Maurizi. 

When the information rights tribunal comes across instances of a public authority’s failure to comply with FOIA obligations it “has been known to be quite trenchant in its criticism,” Dehon, told The Dissenter. But it is “unusual in the run of cases that are specific to Stefania’s FOIA requests” for the tribunal to be as critical as it was last week, she added.

“What we can do now is say to the ICO, look at the quality of the search process [conducted by a public body when a FOIA request is made]. If the search process was poor, then that is an indication that the information is being, or might be, held despite the public authority’s claims to the contrary,” Dehon said.

Kristinn Hrafnsson, WikiLeaks’ editor-in-chief, told The Dissenter, “This is a significant victory in a long battle to get the truth out on the involvement of CPS in keeping Julian in arbitrary detention that later turned into political imprisonment, according to UN bodies and the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe.” 

The tribunal ordered the CPS to confirm whether it holds information as to “when, how and why” it destroyed or deleted any “hard or electronic copies of emails” with the Swedish Prosecution Authority by February 21 at 4 p.m. If they have any such information they must provide it to Maurizi or otherwise explain why they are exempt from doing so.

‘Unfounded’ Assumptions Prevented Adequate Search For Records

“Overall, based on the evidence before us, our concern is that over a number of years the CPS has not properly addressed itself at least to recording, if not undertaking, adequate searches in relation to the CPS lawyer’s emails, with the result that, in 2023, when it has purported to answer [Maurizi’s] 2019 [FOIA] Request, it has not been able to give a clear and complete account,” the Tribunal stated in its decision.

The tribunal noted that the CPS’s approach “appears to have been informed by a combination of unfounded and incorrect assumptions or speculation, flawed corporate memory, and unreliable anecdotal instruction, much, but not all, of that resting inevitably in the natural succession of employees through the organisation over time.”

“The cumulative effect of those things, taken together with what we find to be (1) imprecisely worded questions and a failure to drill down into answers, and (2) the absence of any clear and complete audit trail of enquiries and responses at each stage, has very likely prevented adequate searches and has certainly prevented a full and satisfactory account of matters.”

An unknown number of emails were apparently deleted after one of the U.K.’s lead prosecutor in the case, Paul Close, retired from the CPS. The deletions occurred despite the fact that the case against the award-winning journalist and publisher of the news and transparency website WikiLeaks was still active.

…………………………………………………………………….. Taking Aim At the UK’s Data Protection Regulator

The tribunal was quite critical of the ICO for its willingness to accept that every reasonable step had been taken by the prosecution to search for the information Maurizi requested. 

…………………………………………………………………. The tribunal found that claims made by the government were contradictory and lacking in evidence to support them and even found “no evidence as to what searches were undertaken” in relation to Maurizi’s earlier FOIA requests. 

……………………………………….The tribunal’s decision represents the latest victory for Maurizi who has filed multiple FOIA requests and appeals over the U.K. and Swedish governments’ handling of Assange’s extradition case. Dehon summarized the decision succinctly, “The tribunal concluded the CPS likely still holds some information explaining what took place. Hopefully that will finally be disclosed.”

“So far we have learned that the CPS overstepped and dictated how the Swedish prosecutor’s office handled the case with the obvious intent to keep Julian in limbo and maintain for years his unlawful detention,” Hrafnsson said. “The world needs to know who dictated CPS staff to handle the case in this manner both inside the U.K. establishment at its initiative and with input from other governments. It is unacceptable that government files in the U.K. are disappeared in an effort to hide the truth from the public.”

Hrafnsson believes that the missing files, or “at least their fate,” will ultimately “shed light on the real story behind the political persecution of Julian Assange.”

………………………………………………………………………………………. more https://thedissenter.org/destroyed-assange-files-why-judges-rebuke-against-crown-prosecution-service-was-so-significant/

January 16, 2025 Posted by Christina Macpherson | secrets and lies | Leave a comment

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/

January 7, 2025 Posted by Christina Macpherson | secrets and lies | Leave a comment

Dangerous Tribunal decision paves way for Dutton to keep nuclear blow-outs secret

by Rex Patrick | Dec 27, 2024,  https://michaelwest.com.au/art-tribunal-secret-snowy-decision-dangerous-for-dutton-nuclear/

The new Administrative Review Tribunal (ART) just ruled the $2B, no $6B, no $12B Snowy 2.0 project immune from public scrutiny. The decision paves the way for secrecy over Peter Dutton’s nuclear ambitions. Rex Patrick reports.

In April 2023, I made a Freedom of Information (FOI) application for access to Snowy Hydro Limited project reports about Snowy 2.0 pumped storage power scheme to the Minister of Climate Change and Energy, Chris Bowen. I also asked for the briefs on Snowy 2.0 prepared by the Department of Climate Change, Energy, the Environment and Water (DCCEEW) for the Minister.

Suspecting things were off the rails, I wanted to see what Snowy Hydro was saying to the DCCEEW in relation to Snowy 2.0’s progress, or lack thereof, and what DCCEEW was then saying to Minister Chris Bowen.

In August 2023 the Government announced a Snowy 2.0 ‘reset’; a marketing label for a massive cost blowout and schedule delay. That caused me to made a further request for the Snowy Hydro Corporate Plan update sent to Bowen and Finance Minister Katy Gallagher to convince them to back the project cost doubling from $6B to $12B.

Access to the project reports and ministerial briefs was flatly refused and so I appealed the matter to the Administrative Appeals Tribunal, now repackaged by Attorney-General Mark Dreyfus as the Administrative Review Tribunal (ART).

Tribunal rejects transparency

In a decision made by Deputy President Peter Britton-Jones, the Tribunal has affirmed the access refusal decisions, effectively shutting down any FOI scrutiny of Snowy 2.0. This mega-project, which has blown out by $10B, is now shrouded in secrecy, blocking the gaze of members of the public, who are paying for the project.

The ART decision has blown a huge hole in government transparency and accountability because it creates a model that could, and almost certainly will, be used to exempt Opposition Leader Peter Dutton’s $331B nuclear power program from any future public scrutiny. It’s a secrecy barn door that’s big enough to drive a nuclear reactor through.

Protecting business information

How did this happen? 

The FOI Act has some reasonable protections in it to ensure sensitive business information is protected from release. 

Section 47 of the FOI Act protects trade secrets or commercially valuable information from being disclosed; a company’s ‘11 secret herbs and spices’ stays just that, secret. No other consideration; it’s a full stop exemption from the requirement to disclose.

Section 47G of the FOI Act protects more general business information which, if released, could adversely affect the business in some way. But this particular disclosure exemption clause is conditional on whether the disclosure would be contrary the public interest.

And that’s fair enough – when a company starts taking money from the public for public purposes, if there’s public interest in disclosing the information (like project cost and schedule blowouts), that just sits as a cost of doing business with the Government.

These are important provisions in our FOI law. Last year eighty-three thousand businesses provided their services or products in exchange for $99.6B of public money.

Removing the public interest

There’s another FOI exemption, Section 45, inserted into Act to prevent a “breach of confidence”; that is a promise to keep information confidential – like Aboriginal tribal secrets provided to government in native title matters; artistic assessments by experts of works of art under consideration for purchase – things that need confidentiality but are not business information.

That’s how the Section 45 exemption was presented to the Parliament way back in 1982 when our FOI law was first debated and legislated. In past decisions of the Tribunal Deputy President Britten-Jones has decided not to give that presentation any weight. Instead, Section 45 is interpreted as an unbreakable secrecy clause whenever government and a business agree that it should apply to information that the business has provided to government.

The end result is that now, despite the Parliament determining that business information should be disclosed if that disclosure is not contrary to the public interest, that legislated provision should not be honoured.

Section 45 is, as a result of past Tribunal decisions, the ‘go to’ exemption from departments trying to protect their projects from any scrutiny.

Quacking like a duck

The only reason I actually challenged DCCEEW and the Minister’s FOI decision in this instance is because there’s a carve out in the FOI Act that says Section 45 does not apply if the disclosure of the document would constitute a ‘breach of confidence’ owed to the Commonwealth.

So, one question before the Tribunal was, is Snowy Hydro ‘the Commonwealth’?

To me, the answer was clear. 

While Snowy Hydro is a distinct legal entity, it is an 100% government-owned corporation, and is largely funded by the public (the Snowy 2.0 ‘basket case’ project is funded by the taxpayer to the tune of $7B and the rest of the money comes from electricity customers – you). 

project is funded by the taxpayer to the tune of $7B and the rest of the money comes from electricity customers – you). 

Snowy Hydro has its board appointed by shareholder ministers and remunerated in accordance with a determination of the Commonwealth’s Remuneration Tribunal.

Snowy Hydro is subject to control by the Commonwealth, is obliged to surrender information (unfettered by any confidentiality obligations) requested by a shareholder minister or the Auditor-General  or the Senate.

I summarised this legal situation in my submissions to the Tribunal, stating, “If it walks like a duck, looks like a duck and quacks like a duck – it’s a duck!”

The lawyers arguing the government’s case insisted none of that mattered. It might look like a duck, it might even be a government duck but it somehow wasn’t a Commonwealth duck.

Britton-Jones decided it was an elusive night owl, declaring that Snowy Hydro Limited is not the Commonwealth.

Dutton’s Nuclear Power Limited

If the ART decision stands, Snowy Hydro will be effectively excluded from FOI scrutiny. That means an impenetrable wall of secrecy, barring investigation of this government owned and controlled company’s mismanagement of the Snowy 2.0 project and its huge cost to taxpayers.  

But that may well be only the beginning of things.

The pieces are all in place for the Coalition’s nuclear power plans to be shrouded in secrecy – thanks in large measure to arguments presented by the Albanese government’s lawyers.

Here’s how Dutton will do it. He just has to follow the Snowy Hydro model and he can ensure than no project reports will ever make it into the hands of the public. The steps are as follows:

1. Legislate to set up ‘Nuclear Power Limited’ by way of statute – the ‘Nuclear Power Limited’ Act – with two Ministers to be shareholders in behalf of government.

2. Include the following words in the Act – “‘Nuclear Power Limited’ is not, and does not represent, the Crown”.

3. Subject ‘Nuclear Power limited’ to a policy requirement to report project status to the shareholder ministers (so they at least know what’s going on).

4. Enter into an agreement between Nuclear Power Limited and the government that states “each party agrees to keep the confidential Information confidential and not to disclose it to anyone without the consent of the other party” provided the information is marked as “confidential” (the actual confidentiality of the information does not matter – the key is that the pages are marked “confidential”

Boom! Secrecy heaven

Financial meltdowns can be secret

Nuclear Power Limited will be Snowy Hydro Limited on radioactive steroids. If the similar magnitude $2B to $12 billion blowout to Snowy 2.0 were to occur with Dutton’s (already understated) $331B Nuclear Power Program, the blowout could amount to trillions of public money burned up building reactors that may never be economically viable.

In that regard, ART Deputy President Britten-Jones may have made the most dangerous decision ever made by an administrative review body (even without reference to Dutton’s plans, it casts a secrecy blanket over $100B of annual government procurement).

As such, I’ve put my hand into my pocket and spent $6K initiating a Federal Court Appeal. This secrecy decision can’t be allowed to stand.

And in the meanwhile, we can all just wonder how many more billions Snowy 2.0 will cost us.

Rex Patrick

Rex Patrick is a former Senator for South Australia and earlier a submariner in the armed forces. Best known as an anti-corruption and transparency crusader, Rex is running for the Senate on the Lambie Network ticket next year – www.transparencywarrior.com.au.

December 27, 2024 Posted by Christina Macpherson | secrets and lies | Leave a comment

‘Nothing to see here’ says Australia as third Thales corruption case starts globally

the NACC did not appear to have placed sufficient weight on the seriousness of the matter, particularly as Thales is linked to several international corruption matters, operates in one of the most corrupt industries in the world, and currently manages Australian Government contracts worth billions of dollars.

the Defence Department hired an external negotiator with a conflict of interest to lead its billion-dollar negotiations with Thales……………………………………Defence’s two lead negotiators together owned 55% of Scotwork, and would benefit financially.

Defence Industry Minister Pat Conroy turns a blind eye to “unethical conduct” between Thales and the Defence Department despite national audit office warning of “capture” by weapons giants

Michelle Fahy, Dec 08, 2024,  https://undueinfluence.substack.com/p/nothing-to-see-here-says-australia?utm_source=post-email-title&publication_id=297295&post_id=152750589&utm_campaign=email-post-title&isFreemail=true&r=1ise1&triedRedirect=true&utm_medium=email
Part 3 of 3 (read part 1 and part 2)

The number of corruption investigations into the Thales Group continues to mount internationally with another announced two weeks ago.

The UK’s Serious Fraud Office and its French equivalent, Parquet National Financier, are jointly investigating suspected bribery and corruption by Thales on a contract in Asia. Thales has denied the allegations.

This followed news in June that police in France, the Netherlands and Spain had raided Thales’ offices in those countries as part of two separate additional corruption investigations into arms deals involving the Thales Group, as we reported in part 2.

In Australia, however, the Albanese government has swept aside a key integrity agency’s reports of “unethical conduct” between Thales and the Defence Department, appointing Thales as the fourth “strategic partner” in the new domestic missile-making enterprise.

Minister for Defence Industry Pat Conroy dismissed as an “unsubstantiated allegation” that was “flying around” the documented concerns of the Australian National Audit Office about a former defence official sharing confidential information with Thales and later soliciting a bottle of champagne from the company.

In a televised address at the National Press Club on October 30, where Conroy announced the government’s appointment of Thales as a Guided Weapons and Explosive Ordnance (GWEO) “Strategic Partner”, the minister was asked whether he remained confident in Thales and its integrity.

Said Conroy: “Let’s be very frank about this thing that’s flying around. There’s an allegation of an incident that occurred in 2017. 2017 – seven years ago – under the last government.

“Defence has thoroughly investigated it and I’m advised that’s there’s been no evidence to substantiate the allegation. It’s important to note that there is one allegation, unsubstantiated.”

But Conroy was wrong to claim the Thales deal has been “thoroughly investigated”, said Chris Douglas, a Perth-based international financial crime consultant.

“It has not been. The Defence Department does not have the capability to investigate allegations that could involve corruption.”

Douglas said that a thorough investigation could only be undertaken by a law enforcement agency, particularly the National Anti-Corruption Commission, “using a full suite of investigation powers including electronic evidence gathering”.

“There might be evidence at the person’s home, Defence isn’t going to find that, or in premises occupied by Thales, Defence won’t find that either. That is why we have a NACC.”

Following the audit office’s scathing June report on the 2020 Thales munitions deal, the Defence Department referred the matter to the NACC.

According to the ABC, after receiving the referral the NACC instructed the Defence Department to conduct the preliminary investigation. The department later said it was unable to substantiate the allegation. (See part 1.)

Douglas said the NACC did not appear to have placed sufficient weight on the seriousness of the matter, particularly as Thales is linked to several international corruption matters, operates in one of the most corrupt industries in the world, and currently manages Australian Government contracts worth billions of dollars.

He added that if Thales was an individual, “based on its past behaviour it would not be given a security clearance, and therefore no employment”.

Following the ABC’s report, Minister Conroy was asked whether he was concerned that the investigation into the unethical conduct appeared “to have hit a dead‑end, with the Anti‑Corruption Commission referring it back to the department, which then found no evidence”.

Conroy responded: “I think the important thing there is all due process was followed… All the organisations involved have investigated this matter.”

GWEO Chief, Air Marshal Leon Phillips, added: “The department has investigated that matter and cannot substantiate what was alleged. So we’ve concluded those matters.”

It is a long way from Defence Minister Richard Marles’ promise on 30 June that the matter would be “fully investigated” in a way which is “completely robust, which people have total confidence in”.

Champagne bottle “least of the concerns” about Defence probity

At a hearing of the parliament’s powerful Joint Committee on Public Accounts and Audit in November, Senator Linda Reynolds, deputy chair of the committee and a former defence minister, raised strong concerns about the 2020 Thales munitions deal.

Reynolds alluded to discrepancies between what she had been told as minister in briefings by the Defence Department and the facts contained in the report.

“When I read this audit report and remembered what had actually come up to me in the [ministerial] brief, it almost made me feel ill … and that is very consistent with the advice that is in this report that went to a different minister in 2017.”

Reynolds’ remarks corroborated the auditor-general’s report: “Defence’s advice to ministers on the tender and contract negotiations did not inform them of the extent of tender non-compliance [by Thales], [the] basis of the decision to proceed to negotiations, or [the] ‘very high risk’ nature of the negotiation schedule.” (p9)

The report also said the department’s advice in mid-2017 to then minister for defence industry Christopher Pyne was incomplete regarding the Department’s decision to proceed with Thales as sole tenderer: “The advice did not address the legal basis for the procurement method, the risks associated with a sole source procurement approach, or value for money issues — including how Defence expected to achieve value for money and maintain commercial leverage in the context of a sole source procurement.” (p10)

We’ve had a history of ANAO reports and [Defence Department] mea culpas… It’s like groundhog day

Reynolds told defence officials at the hearing: “These are not the first appalling findings by the ANAO… We’ve had a history of ANAO reports and [Defence Department] mea culpas… It’s like groundhog day… I think the bottle of champagne was the least of the concerns in relation to probity.”

She said the fact that the government was continuing to award new contracts to Thales was a concern: “You’ve inherited a smell, a big smell.”

Defence appointed a lead negotiator that was providing training to Thales at the same time

In a repeat of the future frigate contract negotiation with BAE Systems (see our Sinking Billions series), the audit report revealed (p87) that the Defence Department hired an external negotiator with a conflict of interest to lead its billion-dollar negotiations with Thales.

The joint negotiation training was provided by Scotwork to both the Thales and the Commonwealth negotiation teams at the same time and location, with no segregation. It was fully paid for by Defence.

Furthermore, in November 2019, Defence was advised by one of its lead negotiators that Thales had engaged Scotwork to deliver a negotiation course (separate to the above training). Defence’s two lead negotiators together owned 55% of Scotwork, and would benefit financially. They said they were not involved with that Thales training, that Scotwork had strict ethical walls in place, and that the revenue was “not material”. Defence accepted this and did not enquire into the dollar value of the revenue.

Defence conducted its contract negotiations with Thales from 5 December 2019 to 19 February 2020.

These are just a few of the many serious issues documented in the audit report.

“Strategic partners” or state capture?

Thales Australia’s CEO, Jeff Connolly, said the announcement of its appointment as Guided Weapons and Explosive Ordnance “Strategic Partner” was “proof of the enduring trust between Thales Australia and the Commonwealth”.

In her evidence to the audit committee, deputy auditor-general Rona Mellor was forthright about the use of such language by government and industry: “One of the big issues is this…nomenclature of ‘strategic partnership’. You’re actually not in partnership. You have a contract… you need to hold them to account.”

On the Thales deal, Mellor told the committee that while big international weapons contractors did “important heavy lifting in defence specialist military equipment and munitions”, keeping an “appropriate distance in our relationships” was important.

She said the audit office had “ongoing concern” about the implementation of the recommendations it issued to Defence, particularly for long-term contracts involving “strategic partners”.

The current report focused on the munitions group, “but next week we’ll go into the shipbuilding group and we’ll see the same thing, or the week after we’ll go into the Air Force and see the same thing”, Mellor said.

“There’s a really big challenge ahead for Defence. The biggest challenge, [as] this one shows, is that there is a culture in these very long-term contracts… There’s a real risk that you get captured by the provider, whether it’s in incumbency in turning contracts over, or in the nature of relationships that you form.”

Thales Australia has managed the Mulwala and Benalla munitions factories for the Commonwealth since the late 1990s. The company has consistently ranked in the Defence Department’s top three contractors, earning more than $1 billion a year from taxpayers. It has $7 billion in current contracts with the department, Austender shows.

Senator Reynolds was defence minister for the final year of the more than decade-long procurement process for the management of the munitions factories. She was the last of seven ministers to oversee the process, which began in 2009. Reynolds became defence minister in May 2019. She approved the deal, along with then finance minister Mathias Cormann, in May 2020. The now $1.4 billion contract expires in 2030.

December 8, 2024 Posted by Christina Macpherson | secrets and lies | Leave a comment