Demowp

Tag: Government of Australia

  • Contract Bikies and Bribed Politicians: Australia’s Nauru Refugee Deal

    It began with the colourful confessions of former Australian Army rifleman Oisin Donohoe. In a report published in The Age on November 8, Donohoe made salty allegations that the private security intended for overseeing “unlawful noncitizens” transferred from Australia to Nauru would be staffed by members of the Finks outlaw motorcycle gang. “It was pretty […]

  • Warmongering Astrologers: Sky News and The War Cabinet

    Twenty-four-hour news networks have demonstrated that surfeit kills discretion. The search for fillers, distractions, and items that will titillate, enrage, or simply sedate is an ongoing process. Gone are the days when discerning choices were made about what constituted worthy news, an admittedly difficult problem that would always lead to priorities, rankings, and judgments that […]

  • Reviewing AUKUS

    It was a deal for the cretinous, hammered out by the less than bright for less than honourable goals. But AUKUS, the trilateral security alliance between Australia, the United Kingdom and the United States, is now finally receiving the broader opprobrium it should have had from the outset. Importantly, criticism is coming from those who […]

  • Predictable Outcomes: Australia, the National Security Committee, and Invading Iraq

    Archivists can be a dull if industrious lot.  Christmas crackers are less important than the new year announcement in Canberra, when the National Archives of Australia releases documents like the newborn into the information world.  The event is not without irony, given that such documents are often aged and seasoned numbers, whiskered by storage and […]

  • When Scott Morrison Met Nemesis

    There are few surprises regarding the final episode of Nemesis, the three-part account on how the Australian Liberal Party, in partnership with the dozy Nationals, psychotically and convulsively disembowelled themselves from the time Tony Abbott won office in 2013.  Over the muddy gore and violence concluding the tenures of Abbott and Malcolm Turnbull, one plotter […]

  • Cannibalism, Conservatives and Lies: Australia’s Nemesis Story

    Palace coups have become a seasonal tradition in Australian politics.  Between 2007 and 2018, Australia had six prime ministers, four of whom were overthrown by their own parties, the first five never being allowed to complete their first term in office.  In contrast, between 1983 and 2007, the country could count on the dry, solid […]

  • Rot in the Civil Service: Farewelling Mike Pezzullo

    There was no better example of Australia’s politicised public service than its Home Affairs Secretary, Mike Pezzullo.  In most other countries, he would have been the ideal conspirator in a coup, a tittletattler in the ranks and bound to brief against those he did not like.  Give him a dagger, and he was bound to […]

  • A Losing Voice: The Fall of an Indigenous Referendum Measure

    Even before October 14, The Voice, or, to describe in full, the Referendum on the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Voice to Parliament, was in dire straits.  Referenda proposals are rarely successful in Australia: prior to October 14, 44 referenda had been conducted since the creation of the Commonwealth in 1901.  Only eight had passed. […]

  • Destroying Chilean Democracy: Australia’s Covert Role Five Decades On

    The tear-squeeze remembering those who died in the September 11, 2001 attacks on New York and Washington has become an annual event.  In the words of US President George W. Bush, it was an attack on “our very freedom”.  The US had been targeted because it was “the brightest beacon for freedom and opportunity in […]

  • Whitewashing Down Under: The Vietnam War Fifty Years On

    The Vietnam War tormented and tore the societies who saw fit to participate in it.  It defined a generation culturally and politically in terms creative and fractious.  And it showed up the rulers to be ignorant rather than bright; blundering fools rather than sages secure in their preaching.  Five decades on, the political classes in […]

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