Israel is a sick society. Before anyone accuses me of being an anti-Semite or reports me to the Jewish Board of Deputies, the Anti-Defamation League, Sharri Markson of The Australian or Michael Danby, the Labor MP for Tel Aviv, I’d like to point that the words are not mine. Israel’s President Reuven Rivlin said publicly…
I rejected social democracy in the early 1960s when I worked on the Mount Isa Mail and saw the Labor Party and trade union leaders betray the miners who were struggling for a pay increase against US-owned Mount Isa Mines Limited. Jack Egerton, later Sir Jack, president of the Queensland Trades and Labor Council, and…
In the early 1990s I asked Gough Whitlam for the greatest crime that the Hawke-Keating government had committed against his legacy. “HECS,” he replied unhesitatingly. I said that the Treasury argument was that the cost was growing exponentially as more people sought higher education and university budgets ballooned. Gough then delivered a short, sharp utterly…
My union, the Media, Entertainment and Arts Alliance, has denounced the Abbott Government’s National Security Legislation Amendment Bill No 1 as “an outrageous attack on press freedom in Australia”. It was passed with the full support of the Labor Opposition led by Bill Shorten. Only Greens MPs objected. MEAA federal secretary Chris Warren condemned the…
When I said Prime Minister Tony Abbott and some senior Cabinet members were suitable cases for clinical treatment, I meant it. Here’s just one reason why. At a Sydney press conference on September 19, Abbott said: “It is a serious situation when all you need to do to carry out a terrorist attack is to…
